Marvell Armada 1500 Google TV Reference Design

Marvell announced that its Foresight Platform, powered by Marvell ARMADA 1500 HD Secure Media Processor System-on-a-Chip (SoC), will be officially used by Google TV (replacing Intel CE4100 SoC) and be introduced at CES 2012. The company said Google TV smart TVs, set-top boxes (STB) and blu-ray players based on its platform would be available later this year. The Foresight Platform uses Marvell’s Qdeo video processing technology designed to deliver improved 3D video, rich audio, 3D graphics and TV-friendly Web content thanks to noise reduction, de-interlacing, low bit-rate internet video enhancement and other enhancement techniques such as Adaptive Contrast Enhancement (ACE) and Intelligent Color Remapping (ICR). ARMADA 1500 (codenamed 88DE3100) contains Marvell’s ARM v6/7-compatible PJ4B SMP super-scalar dual-core CPU. The chip is designed to enable PC-like processing power to support Web browsing with support for Flash and other key technologies – with the aid of more than 6000 Dhrystone MIPS of […]

Raspberry Pi Beta Boards Are Being Auctioned

The Raspberry Pi foundation has setup an Ebay account and made some of the Raspberry Pi Beta Board Model B (Ethernet + 256 MB RAM) available on Ebay. This is for charity so you won’t be able to get them for 35 USD… The current bid is 1,320.00 GBP (2050 USD). They’ll add 2 boards on Ebay each day. The goal of this auction is to gather funds in order to hire a full-time staff and give as many Raspberry Pi away to kids as possible. If you win the bid, you’ll get one of the 10 boards for sale, a USB power, an SD card with Debian, and some kind of certificate showing you were one of the first to get a board. If you are interested, you can bid at http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Raspberry-Pi-Model-B-beta-board-10-limited-series-10-/180786734741?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item2a17baa695 Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as […]

Linux for Cortex M3 & M4 Microcontrollers

There are plenty of low cost Linux development boards based on Cortex A8 or A9 such as the Beaglebone, as well as some devkits based on ARM7 and ARM9 such as SAM9 development kits , but if your application is cost and/or energy sensitive you can also switch to micro-controllers using Cortex M3 or M4 based development boards such as Emcraft SmartFusion devkits. You can run a functional uCLinux system with 1MB of RAM and 1MB of flash including the TCP/IP stack. You need to use uClinux and not directly Linux, because the Cortex M3 doess not have a Memory Management Unit (MMU) and only a Memory Protection Unit (MPU). This can bring some interesting software development challenges such as (apparently random) kernel panics, the lack of fork, memory fragmentation and more. You can check out http://kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/uclibc/Glibc_vs_uClibc_Differences.txt for the main differences between uClibc and Glibc. The instructions to patch and […]

AllWinner A10/A1X Processor Resources, Development Board and SDK

AllWinner A10 (part of A1X series) is an ARM Cortex A8 SoC targetting multimedia products such as tablets, HD STB or digital signage. It is currently found in some low cost Android tablets such as Momo9C and will be used in Rhombus Tech’s Raspberry Pi alternative. The processor features an ARM Cortex A8 clocked at 1.5 Ghz with a Mali-400 GPU. It can support 1080p encoding/decoding, provides HDMI, Component, Composite, VGA and LVDS video outputs,  USB2.0 ports, a SATA 2.0 port and more… Here are the key features of the Allwinner A10: VPU (Video Processing Unit) HD Video Decoding (Super HD 2160P/3D Film) Support all popular video formats, including VP8, AVS, H. 264 AVC, VC-1, MPEG-1/2/4, … HD Video Encoding (H.264 High Profile) Support encoding in H.264 format DPU (Display Processing Unit) MULTI-CHANNEL HD displays Built-in HDMI YPbPr, CVBS, VGA LCD interfaces: CPU, RGB, LVDS up to Full HD Memory […]

Linaro 11.12 Release with Kernel 3.1.5

Linaro has just released version 11.12 based on Linux Kernel 3.1.5 and further support for Android 4.0 including graphics hardware acceleration on Snowball and Origen development boards. Here are the highlights of the release: Android Linaro ICS is built with the Linaro toolchain. Linaro ICS is running on all supported boards. DS-5 with Gator is supported in all Linaro Andoid ICS builds. The latest version of libpng (1.5.7) has been integrated in Linaro ICS. An AOSP master build is now available from linaro. ARM® Mali™ Hardware Accelerated Graphics is supported on Origen and Snowball. libjpeg-turbo has been integrated into all Andoid ICS builds. Developer Platform The linux-linaro and lt-panda kernel packages are now automatically generated by the CI build scripts DS-5 with Gator is supported in all Ubuntu LEB builds. XBMC packages, with Gstreamer and OpenGLES support, are now available at the Ubuntu Overlay (supporting only Panda initially) U-Boot-Linaro is […]

Nvidia Announces CARMA Tegra 3 CUDA Development Kit

Nvidia has just unveiled its Tegra 3 development kit, the Nvidia CARMA. The development kit codename has been crowdsourced as Nvidia asked its followers to propose a name and vote for the best name. This development kit particularly targets CUDA, Nvidia parallel computing platform and programming model that enables dramatic increases in computing performance by harnessing the power of the graphics processing unit (GPU). The CARMA hardware has been designed by Seco and features an NVIDIA Tegra 3 ARM Cortex A9 Quad-Core CPU and NVIDIA CUDA GPU QuatroTM. Here are the technical specs for the development kit: CPU NVIDIA Tegra 3 Quad-Core ARM A9 GPU NVIDIA QuadroTM 1000M with 96 CUDA Cores Memory • CPU Memory: 2 GB • GPU Memory: 2 GB Peak Performance 270 Single Precision GFlops CPU – GPU Interface PCIe x4 Gen1 link Network 1x Gigabit Ethernet Storage 1x SATA Connector USB 3x USB 2.0 Display […]

Solid-Run CuBox: Open Source Platform for Android TV, Media Center and NAS Development

Solid-Run CuBox is a miniature open source development platform based on Marvell Armada 510 SoC (88AP510) and aimed at applications such as multimedia, set-top-box, network attached storage (NAS), thin client, digital signage, automation… CuBox measures 55mm x 55mm x 42mm (so it’s not a Cube) and consuming less than 3 watts. The device runs Android 2.2 or Linux 2.6 on an 800MHz Marvell Armada 510 CPU (ARMv7 architecture) with 1GB of DDR3 memory and a microSD slot. It also includes eSATA, USB, infrared, S/PDIF, HDMI and gigabit Ethernet interfaces. CuBox Developer Platform includes the following key features – Marvell Armada 510 SoC – 800 MHz dual issue ARM PJ4 processor, VFPv3, wmmx SIMD and 512KB L2 cache. 1GByte DDR3 at 800MHz 1080p Video Decode Engine OpenGL ES 2.0 graphic engine HDMI 1080p Output (with CEC function) Gigabit Ethernet, SPDIF (optical audio), eSata 3Gbps, 2xUSB 2.0, micro-SD, micro-USB (console) Standard Infra-red receiver […]

5th Linux BSP Release for Snowball Development Board

Igloo Community – the team developing for ST Ericsson Snowball Nova A9500 development board – has released the fifth version of the Linux BSP for the board and this version nearly fully support all features of the board. It can be downloaded at http://igloocommunity.org/download/linaro/images/20111209/. ChangeLog since last release: Based on Linaro Ubuntu 11.11 desktop filesystem Accelerometer and barometer support for all board revisions GPS support Enhancements to the default kernel config (NFS, /proc/config.gz support) Enhanced display support Add support for new connectivity module versions Main supported features: Based on Linux 3.0.0 and the Linaro Ubuntu desktop file system HDMI/DVI-D display support Graphics acceleration with the Mali 400 GPU Bluetooth support GPS support Ethernet and Wireless connectivity microSD card support Sensors (accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, barometer) Limited USB OTG host functionality Features to be included in future releases: Multimedia acceleration Better USB OTG host support Known issues: USB OTG host mode is […]