LEAGOO T5c Smartphone Features Spreadtrum SC9853i Octa-core Intel Airmont SoC

Intel is supposed to have left the mobile and IoT markets, but a few month ago, I wrote about Spreadtrum SC9861G-IA, an octa-core Intel Airmont SoC designed for LTE smartphones. Airmont is the microarchitecture used in Intel’s Cherry Trail and Braswell SoC, so the Spreadtrum SoC is not based on a new microarchitecture, but it still shows Intel decided to still use the technology, just not with their name on the processor. The news was published in February, but so far I have not seen any phone based on the processor. Instead, a similarly specced SoC, namely Spreatrum SC9853i, is now found in LEAGOO T5c 5.5″ smartphone with 3GB RAM and 32GB flash. LEAGOO T5c smartphone specifications: SoC – Spreatrum SC9853i octa-core Intel 64-bit Airmont “Cherry Trail-T” processor @ up to 1.8 GHz (14-nm FinFET process) System Memory – 3GB RAM Storage – 32GB eMMC flash Display – 5.5″ SHARP […]

First OpenCL Encounters on Cortex-A72: Some Benchmarking

This is a guest post by blu about his experience with OpenCL on MacchiatoBin board with a quad core Cortex A72 processor and an Intel based MacBook. He previously contributed several technical articles such as How ARM Nerfed NEON Permute Instructions in ARMv8 or OpenGL ES development on Ubuntu Touch. Qualcomm launched their long-awaited server ARM chip the other day, and we started getting the first benchmarks. Incidentally, I too managed to get some OpenCL ray-tracing code running on an ARM Cortex-A72 machine that same day (thanks to pocl – an LLVM-based open-source OCL multi-platform implementation), so my benchmarking curiosity got me. The code in question is an OCL (half-finished) port of a graphics demo from 2014. Some remarks of what it does: For each frame: a single thread builds a sparse voxel octree from a dynamic voxel scene; the octree, along with current camera settings are passed to an […]

Qualcomm Centriq 2400 ARM SoC Launched for Datacenters, Benchmarked against Intel Xeon SoCs

Qualcomm Centriq 2400 ARM Server-on-Chip has been four years in the making. The company announced sampling in Q4 2016 using 10nm FinFET process technology with the SoC featuring up to 48 Qualcomm Falkor ARMv8 CPU cores optimized for datacenter workloads. More recently, Qualcomm provided a few more details about the Falkor core, fully customized with a 64-bit only micro-architecture based on ARMv8 / Aarch64. Finally, here it is as the SoC formally launched with the company announcing commercial shipments of Centriq 2400 SoCs. Qualcom Centriq 2400 key features and specifications: CPU – Up to 48 physical ARMv8 compliant 64-bit only Falkor cores @ 2.2 GHz (base frequency) / 2.6 GHz (peak frequency) Cache – 64 KB L1 instructions cache with 24 KB single-cycle L0 cache, 512 KB L2 cache per duplex; 60 MB unified L3 cache; Cache QoS Memory – 6 channels of DDR4 2667 MT/s  for up to 768 […]

MINIX based Intel Management Engine Firmware & UEFI are Closed Source & Insecure, NERF to the Rescue!

You may have heard a few things about Intel Management Engine in recent months, especially as security issues have been found, the firmware is not easily upgradeable, and the EFF deemed it a security hazard asking Intel for ways to disable it. In recent days, I’ve seen several media reports about the Management Engine being based on an Intel Quark x86-based 32-bit CPU running MINIX open-source operating system. Keep in mind, there’s nothing nefarious about MINIX, it’s just that Intel keeps its own developments on top closed. One of sources for the information is a blog post explaining how to disable Intel ME 11, but ZDNET also points to one of the talks at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2017 entitled “Replace Your Exploit-Ridden Firmware with Linux” by Ronald Minnich, Google which explains the problem, and proposes a solution to (almost) disable Intel’s ME, and replace UEFI by a small […]

Arduino Create Adds Support for Linux Development Boards (based on Intel processors for now)

Most people are used to program Arduino compatible boards with the Arduino IDE that they’ve installed in their Windows/Linux/Mac OS computer, and manage everything locally. But Arduino introduced Arduino Create last year, which includes Arduino Web Editor allowing you to perform the same tasks in your web browser, and save your files in the cloud. The company has now added Linux support to Arduino Create so that users can now program their Linux devices as if they were regular Arduino boards, and easily deploy IoT applications with integrated cloud services. The initial release has been sponsored by Intel, and currently supports X86/X86_64 boards, but other hardware architectures will be supported in the coming month. In the meantime, AAEON UP2 board is the best platform to get started, as a complete getting started guide is available for the platform. But other mini PCs such as Intel NUC, Dell Wyse, Gigabyte GB-BXT are […]

Intel Optane 900P Series SSD Launched for Desktop PCs

Intel and Micron first unveiled 3D Xpoint technology (pronounced “crosspoint”) in 2015 with the promise of 1000x faster storage and 1000x better endurance than NAND flash used in SSDs. Performance was later reduced to about 7x better IOPS in a prototype, and Intel started to sell the technology under the Optane brand with the 375GB SSD DC P4800X for the enterprise market. Since then Intel entered the consumer market with 16GB and 32GB Optane M.2 cards which are meant to be used as disk cache in compatible systems thanks to their high random I/O performance, and now the company has announced the first consumer grade 3D Xpoint SSDs for desktops and work stations with Optane 900P Series available in HHHL (CEM3.0) and U.2 15mm form factors, and with random I/O performance up to four times faster than competitive NAND-based SSDs. Optane SSD 900P Series specifications: Capacity – 280 to 480 […]

Intel Speech Enabling Developer Kit Works with Alexa Voice Service, Raspberry Pi 3 Board

We’ve known Intel has been working on Quark S1000 “Sue Creek” processor for voice recognition for several months. S1000 SoC is based on two Tensilica LX6 with HiFi3 DSP, some speech recognition accelerators, and up to 8x microphones interfaces which allows it to perform speech recognition locally. The solution can also be hooked to an application processor via SPI, I2S and USB (optional) when cloud based voice recognition is needed. Intel has recently introduced their Speech Enabling Developer Kit working with Amazon Alexa Voice Service (AVS) featuring a “dual DSP with inference engine” – which must be Quark S1000 – and an 8-mic array. The kit also includes a 40-pin cable to connect to the Raspberry Pi 3 board. Intel only provided basic specifications for the kit: Intel’s dual DSP with inference engine Intel 8-mic circular array High-performance algorithms for acoustic echo cancellation, noise reduction, beamforming and custom wake word […]

Google Clips is an A.I. Camera Powered by Movidius Myriad 2 VPU

Most consumer cameras offers some ways for the photographer to check the framing of the picture, such as a viewfinder or LCD display, before pressing the button. The first time I saw a consumer camera without such features was with MeCam, a tiny snap-on camera that you can wear on your shirt, and just press a button to take a picture. Convenient, but no ideal as subjects were often out of frame with the camera pointing at the wrong angle. That was in 2013. But today, those cameras can be improved with artificial intelligence, and Google Clips is a camera without viewfinder nor LCD display that can allegedly take good photos – or short clips – automatically, acting in some ways like a human photographer, so that every human in the room / the whole family can be on the shot. Google Clips specifications: Vision Processing Unit – Movidius Myriad […]

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