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December 31, 2025January 4, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

VisionFive 2 Lite SBC Review – Ubuntu 24.04 on a low-cost RISC-V SBC in 2026

VisionFive 2 Lite RISC-V SBC Ubuntu Review 2026

StarFive has sent me a sample of the VisionFive 2 Lite RISC-V SBC for review. It’s a low-cost credit card-sized board based on the StarFive JH7110S quad-core RISC-V SBC and designed to get started with Linux RISC-V on the cheap. When I first tested the earlier VisionFive 2 SBC with a StarFive JH7110 RISC-V SoC in February 2023, I didn’t call it a review, but rather a hands-on experience, since, at the time, many features still didn’t work properly. Almost three years have passed since then, so reviewing the VisionFive 2 Lite SBC with Ubuntu 24.04 will allow us to see how much progress has been made on the software side. If you are in a rush, you can jump to the what works, what doesn’t section. VisionFive 2 Lite unboxing I received the board in a plastic box with a cover reading “VisionFive 2 Lite Your Gateway to RISC-V”. […]

December 13, 2025December 17, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

CIX releases P1 CPU TRM and developer guides for GPU, AI accelerator, OS and firmware/BIOS

CIX has finally released the technical reference manual (TRM) for the P1 (CD8180/CD8160) Arm Cortex-A720/A520 SoC, along with developer guides for the GPU (Arm Immortalis G720 and NVIDIA/AMD discrete graphics cards), the AI accelerator, as well as OS (Android, Linux, and Windows) and firmware (BIOS) installation and development. A slow (but steady?) progress There was a lot of excitement when the Radxa Orion O6 mini-ITX motherboard was introduced in December 2024, as we were told the CIX P1 12-core Armv9 processor would offer performance similar to Apple M1 SoC and Qualcomm 8cx Gen3 platform, at an affordable price ($199 and up for the mini-ITX board), and software support would include a Debian image, full UEFI via an open-source EDKII implementation, as well as an SDK along with hardware and software documentation, community forum support, and regular firmware & OS updates. CIX was even called “a native open source ecosystem chip […]

December 3, 2025December 3, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Tyr – A Rust GPU driver for Arm Mali GPUs

One interesting addition to the just-released Linux 6.18 kernel is the Tyr Rust GPU driver for CSF-based Arm Mali GPUs, which is a port of the mature Panthor C GPU driver merged into Linux 6.10. It was developed by Collabora in collaboration with Arm and Google. Tyr aims to implement the same userspace API offered by Panthor, so that it can eventually be used as a drop-in replacement in the company’s PanVK Vulkan driver. After several years, the Tyr Rust driver might replace the Panthor C driver, but in the meantime, Panthor will keep being used since it is more mature and conformant with OpenGL ES 3.1 since July 2024. The work on Tyr is fairly advanced, and Collabora provided an update at the end of November. The key takeaway is that the Tyr (prototype) driver works with GNOME, Weston, and even full-screen 3D games like SuperTuxKart while matching the […]

September 30, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Fogwise AIRbox Q900 – $599 Qualcomm IQ-9075 AI Box delivers up to 200 TOPS of AI performance

Fogwise AIRBox Q900 AI box is an upgrade to the Fogwise Airbox powered by a Qualcomm IQ-9075 SoC with up to 200 TOPS (sparse) of AI performance, 36GB RAM, and 128GB UFS storage. Radxa says its new AI micro-server competes directly against the NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX 16GB, offering cheaper overall system cost, similar performance, and higher efficiency. Other benefits include Cortex-R52 real-time cores, 2.5GbE networking, and separate GPU, NPU, and DSP. Fogwise AIRBox Q900 specifications: SoC – Qualcomm DragonWing IQ-9075 CPU Octa-core Kryo Gen 6 (Cortex-A78C-based) application cores @ up to 2.36 GHz Quad-ore Cortex-R52 real-time cores @ up to 1.85GHz GPU – Adreno 663 GPU delivering up to 1.2 TFLOPS FP32 with secure GPU compute; supports Vulkan 1.2, OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 2.0 FP, Adreno NN Direct VPU – Adreno VPU 765 Video Decode AV1 / HEVC / H.265 / H.264 / VP9 / MPEG-2 1x 8Kp60 / […]

September 10, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Arm introduces Lumex platform with SME2-enabled C1 CPU for Edge AI, Mali-G1 GPU

Arm Lumex CSS (Compute SubSystem) platform for mobile devices combines high-performance Arm C1 CPUs with Scalable Matrix Extension version 2 (SME2) and Mali-G1 GPUs to enable real-time on-device AI use cases like assistants, voice translation, and personalization. Lumex is part of Arm’s new product naming architecture announced last May, and targets specifically mobile devices. Arm says SME2-enabled Arm CPUs can deliver up to 5x faster AI performance, 4.7x lower latency for speech-based workloads, and 2.8x faster audio generation. Lumex components: Next-generation SME2-enabled Armv9.3 CPU cluster: C1-Ultra for flagship peak performance with +25% single-thread performance vs Cortex-X925; suitable for large-model inference, computational photography, content creation, generative AI C1-Premium with C1-Ultra performance, but greater area efficiency (35% smaller area than C1-Ultra); suitable for sub-flagship mobile segments, voice assistants, multitasking C1-Pro for sustained efficiency; +16% sustained performance vs Cortex-A725; ideal for video playback, streaming inference C1-Nano for maximum efficiency, smaller area for wearables, […]

August 13, 2025August 13, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Arm neural technology to add AI acceleration to Arm GPUs, enable “Neural Super Sampling” for lower bandwidth/higher FPS

Arm neural technology will add dedicated neural/AI accelerators to Arm GPUs launched in 2026 and beyond to deliver up to 50% GPU workload reduction for mobile games and other graphics-intensive apps. The first application is called Arm Neural Super Sampling (NSS). It’s a kind of AI Super Resolution implementation for games, where rather than upscaling videos, the AI accelerator upscales graphics to lower the required bandwidth and increase the frame rate (or lower the power consumption) with no impact on the rendering quality. Watch the video below to see a demo rendered at 540p resolution by the GPU and upscaled to 1080p resolution by Arm neural technology with no obvious defects. The upscaler will introduce some lag, but only about 4ms per frame in sustained performance conditions, as explained in a technical blog about the Arm Neural and NSS announcement: We assume a target of 10 TOP/s per-watt of neural acceleration […]

May 22, 2025May 22, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

PocketBeagle 2 Rev A1 board gets 1.4 GHz Sitara AM6254 quad-core Cortex-A53/Cortex-M4F SoC with 3D GPU

The PocketBeagle 2 was first introduced with a 1.0 GHz Texas Instruments Sitara AM6232 dual-core Cortex-A53 GPUless SoC in February with Rev A0 of the PCB. The BeagleBoard.org Foundation has now released a new PocketBeagle 2 Rev A1 board with a 1.4 GHz Sitara AM6254 quad-core Cortex-A53/Cortex-M4F SoC with a 3D GPU. All other features remain the same, with a secondary Texas Instruments MSPM0L1105 Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller, 512 MB LPDDR4 memory, a microSD card slot, a USB Type-C port for power and connectivity, a Raspberry Pi Debug Probe port, and two 36-pin expansion headers. PocketBeagle 2 Rev A1 specifications: Main SoC – Texas Instruments AM6254 as found in the BeaglePlay SBC CPU Quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A53 @ 1.4 GHz Arm Cortex-M4F real-time core @ 400 MHz with 256KB SRAM GPU – Imagination PowerVR Rogue AXE-1-16M with support for OpenGL 3.x/2.0/1.1, Vulkan 1.2 Dual-core Programmable Real-Time Unit Subsystem (PRUSS) running up […]

May 1, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Canonical releases Ubuntu 24.04 Desktop image for the Qualcomm DragonWing QCS6490 and QCS5430 processors

Canonical has just released a publicly available Ubuntu 24.04 Desktop beta image for the Qualcomm DragonWing QCS6490 and QCS5430 processors, and more specifically for the Qualcomm RB3 Gen 2 Vision Kit (QCS6490) and Qualcomm RB3 Gen 2 Lite Vision Kit (QCS5430). This adds to the existing Ubuntu 24.04 Server image for the Qualcomm vision kits, and Canonical says the unified image is currently designed for developers, ODMs/OEMs, and customers who want to evaluate the solution, and certified versions of Ubuntu 24.04 Desktop and Server images are coming soon with long term support and maintenance. Canonical explains the image enables the full Ubuntu Desktop experience at the edge with “powerful AI acceleration with high-performance graphics” (so I assume that means GPU and NPU are already supported), enhanced camera and multimedia capabilities, sensor integration, and various performance optimizations of the DragonWing family. So the way I read the announcement is that contrary […]