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May 6, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

AMD Ryzen 5000 C-Series processors target Chrome OS devices for work

AMD has just introduced the 15W Ryzen 5000 C-Series “Zen 3” processors for premium Chrome OS devices designed for work and collaboration. The processors can with up to eight cores and sixteen threads and are said to offer all-day battery life. AMD Ryzen 5000 C-Series processors for Chrome OS are expected to offer up to 67% faster responsiveness and up to 85% better graphics performance when comparing a Chromebook based on AMD Ryzen 7 5825C against an earlier model based on AMD Ryzen 7 3700C introduced in 2020 using respectively WebXPRT 3 and Motion Mark 1.2 benchmarks. Multitasking performance comparison using Geekbench 5 shows a 107% improvement that is probably mostly due to the doubling of the number of cores. The AMD Ryzen 5000 C-Series “”Barcelo” family is currently comprised of four parts. We can look at the Ryzen 7 5825C other features for more details: Cache – 512KB L1 […]

May 25, 2021May 25, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 SoC for laptops and Chromebooks

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 SoC for entry-level laptops and Chromebooks follows the steps of the Snapdragon 7c processor with a slightly higher frequency for the Kryo 468 cores, leading to a 6% performance improvements. As we’ll see below, most of the specifications are exactly the same, except the built-in Snapdragon X15 LTE modem is now listed as supporting LTE Cat 14 up to 600 Mbps, instead of LTE Cat 15 up to 800 Mbps, and UFS downgraded to UFS 2.1 from UFS 3.0. Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 specifications: CPU – Octa-core Kryo 468 (Cortex-A76) processor up to 2.55 GHz GPU – Unnamed Qualcomm Adreno GPU (Note: Snapdragon 7c had Qualcomm Adreno 618 GPU) DSP – Qualcomm Hexagon 692 DSP Memory – 2x 16-bit LPDDR4x-4266 Storage – eMMC 5.1, UFS 2.1 Display On-device display up to QXGA (2048 x 1536) @ 60 Hz External display up to QHD (2560×1440) @ […]

September 3, 2020August 5, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Congatec Unveils COM Express & COM-HPC Tiger Lake Computers-on-Module

conga-TC570 Tiger Lake COM Express Module

Intel Core “Tiger Lake” processors designed for ultra-thin laptops have just been officially launched together with some laptop announcements. But Tiger Lake processors will find their way into embedded applications as well, with Congatec announcing conga-TC570 COM Express Type 6 Compact module and conga-HPC/cTLU COM-HPC high-performance module both featuring Intel Tiger Lake-UP3 (12W to 25W TDP) processors. conga-TC570 Tiger Lake COM Express Module Specifications: SoC – Intel Core i3/i5/i7 Tiger Lake-UP3 processor with up to 96 EU Intel Iris Xe graphics; 12W-28W configurable TDP System Memory – Up to 2x SO-DIMM sockets for DDR4 memory modules up to 32 GB each with 3200 MT/s ECC and non-ECC supported Networking – Intel i225 Gigabit Ethernet controller with TSN support COM Express board-to-board connectors with 440 pins Video Output – HDMI 2.0/2.1, DP 1.4, MIPI D-PHY 2.1; up to 4x independent display unit (4x 4K or 2x 8K) Storage – 2x SATA […]

June 26, 2020June 26, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

ASUS Chromebit CS10 Chrome OS PC Stick Sells for $69.99 (Promo)

ASUS Chromebit CS10 was the cheapest Chrome OS hardware when it launched in 2015. Equipped with a Rockchip RK3288-C quad-core processor coupled with 2 GB RAM and 16 GB eMMC. plus one HDMI port and one USB port it was offered for $85. Five years later it’s still available, and while the list price has slightly increased to $89, Chromebit CS10 is now offered for just $69.99 on Amazon US. Here’s a reminder of ASUS Chromebit CS10 specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3288-C quad-core Cortex A17 processor with ARM Mali-T764 GPU. System Memory – 2 GB LPDDR3 Storage – 16 GB eMMC flash, plus 100G Google Drive for 2 Year free usage (not sure if this is still an option as we’ll discuss below) Video Output – HDMI Connectivity – Dual-band 802.11 2×2 (MIMO) a/b/g/n/ac WiFi 5, Bluetooth 4.0 USB – 1x USB 2.0 host port, 1x micro USB OTG port […]

September 3, 2018September 3, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Self-hosted GLES on ChromeOS, part two

This is a follow-up post from an earlier guest post by Blu about OpenGL ES development on Chrome OS. One can’t practice real-time rendering to disk files for long ‒ it’s just unnatural. So after checking that my habitual GLES tests work as intended on ChromeOS when rendering to an off-screen-buffer-subsequently-saved-to-a-PNG, the next step was to figure out a way how to show frames on screen at a palpable framerate, if possible. Being as new to Chrome OS as the next guy, I had to start from scratch with ‘How to show EGL surfaces on screen fast’. In the comments section to the first article William Barath kindly mentioned that there was a wayland client library on Chromebrew, so I decided to pursue that as I had had (positive) prior experience with wayland. Long story short, the established way on most platforms for connecting wayland to EGL (or vice versa) […]

August 10, 2018August 12, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Self-hosted OpenGL ES Development on ChromeOS?

This is a guest post by blu about developing OpenGL ES applications on Chrome OS. Ever since I’ve been using a chromebook in developer mode as my daily notebook (can’t beat 10h-plus battery life on ~300EUR well-performing machines), I’ve been missing one thing ‒ OpenGL ES coding under ChromeOS. My chromebook is more than well-equipped for GLES3 hardware-wise (verified via dual-booting to ArchLinux), and I always have up-to-date toolchains self-hosted under ChromeOS, thanks to an excellent package manager aptly named Chromebrew. And yet my coding-on-the-go under ChromeOS has been limited to console apps ‒ ChromeOS has strict limitations which include no X11 display manager, or any other industry-standard display manager that I’m aware of, and I don’t feel like dual-booting into ArchLinux too often ‒ ChromeOS has spoiled me with its fine-tuned performance. The no-display-manager limitation of ChromeOS is usually worked-around via Crouton but in my case Crouton would not […]

May 14, 2018May 14, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

How to Run Chrome OS in Android Emulator

While it’s possible to run the open source Chromium OS in your computer or a virtual machine, AFAIK there was only was way to test Chrome OS: purchasing an actual Chromebook, or other device running the operating system. But this week-end, I read the news that Chrome OS was now available in Android Studio, and you can run in Android Emulator while emulating a Pixelbook, so I gave it a try by following the instructions on Android Developer website. If you haven’t done so already, we first need to install Android Studio. I’m running Ubuntu 16.04 in my computer, but this will also work in Windows and Mac OS X. After download the IDE zip file, we can extract it… and then open a console, go into “{installation home}/bin” and run the program:

./studio.sh

1	./studio.sh

After a few seconds, we got into Android Studio 3.1.2 welcome screen. We can now click […]

April 21, 2018April 24, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Run Linux Apps in (PixelBook) Chromebook with Crostini VM

Ever since the first Chromebooks were released, it has been possible to run Ubuntu or other Linux distributions using Crouton (Chromium OS Universal Chroot Environment) on Chrome OS devices, but that requires to enable developer mode, which disables some of security features that come with Chrome OS. Google has now make it easier and safer with Crostini VM that does not require developer mode. The only downsides for now are that it only works on Google Pixelbook, and you need to install/run Chrome OS v67 dev channel with the #enable-cros-container flag enabled. Using Crostini is fairly straightforward. First start crosh terminal with Ctrl++Atl+t, and running the following command to create a VM, and launch a container:

vmc start dev
run_container.sh --container_name=stretch --user=<username> --shell

1 2	vmc start dev run_container.sh --container_name=stretch --user=<username> --shell

This will start a Debian Stretch environment with networking and GUI support, so you can install & run programs like you would in Debian (e.g. apt install htop). Kevin Tofel at AboutChromebooks managed […]