Intel to Give Away 5 Atom D2700 Development Kits to Selected Engineers

As part of its “Eureka! Design Challenges“, Intel is asking hardware engineers to submit ideas about what they’ll do with an Intel Atom D2700 development kit with 2Gb RAM, a 40 GB SSD drive & lots of ports and expansions, and will give one to the 5 candidates with the best project ideas. Here are the key features of this development kit: Development board with the Intel Atom Processor D2700, and IntelNM10 Express Chipset Board Support package from the Linux Foundation’s Yocto Project 2GB DDR21066 MT/s non-ECC memory 40GB SSD, installed, with SATA extension cable Power supply The Intel Software Development Tool Suite (GNU tool compatible) Documentation and software Comes in a mini-ITX chassis with dual independent display capabilities. I’m not sure why Intel is focusing on hardware engineer for this type of project, and I suppose if you have some embedded systems development ideas that interface with external hardware, […]

LinuxCon North America 2012 Schedule

LinuxCon (North America) 2012 will take place on August 29 – 31, 2012 at Sheraton Hotel & Marina, in San Diego, California. The event will be co-located with the Linux Kernel Summit, the Linux Plumbers Conference, and CloudOpen 2012. LinuxCon consists of 3 days of keynotes, business and developers related sessions as well as tutorials. There will be over 80 sessions and keynotes during those 3 days. I’ll highlight a few sessions that I find particularly interesting and related to embedded Linux, software development and ARM. August 29 10:45 – 11:30 – Life After BerkeleyDB: OpenLDAP’s Memory-Mapped Database by Howard Chu, Symas Abstract: OpenLDAP’s new MDB library is a highly optimized B+tree implementation that is orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than everything else in the software world. Reads scale perfectly linearly across arbitrarily many CPUs with no bottlenecks, and data is returned with zero memcpy’s. Writes are on […]

ARM vs x86 Servers Benchmark – Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-1000 vs Intel Xeon E3-1240

Calxeda has released the results of ApacheBench benchmark comparing their ARM-based EnergyCore solution to an Intel Xeon server in order to showcase the performance and the much lower power consumption of their servers. Here’s the setup: Hardware: Single Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-1000 @ 1.1 GHz, 4 GB of DDR3L-1066 memory, 1Gb Ethernet network port and 250 GB SATA 7200rpm HDD Intel Xeon E3-1240 @ 3.3 GHz, 16 GB memory and 1Gb Ethernet network port. No info on hard drive provided Software: Ubuntu Server v12.04 Apache Server v2.4.2 ApacheBench v2.3 (16k request size) They performed power measurements every 2 seconds and averaged the results. Power supply overhead and hard drive power consumption were not excluded in the measurement, but the entire SoC and DDR memory power consumption were included together. For the Intel server however, they could not measure directly, so they used published TDP values for the CPU (80 W) and I/O […]

Intel Roadmap to 2015 and Beyond: 5nm Technology, Merrifield Mobile Processor, Microservers and More

Intel had their annual Investor meeting day on the 10th of May 2012 in Santa Clara where we would learn a few things about what’s ahead for Intel and the semiconductor industry. Paul Otellini, Intel President and Chief Executive Officer, started the meeting by  giving some numbers about Intel results and showing opportunities existing for cloud and data center, personal computing, mobile devices and intelligent systems (for automotive, retail and communications markets). One interesting point was the tremendous growth in data Intel expects from 2,500 Exabytes per year (7 EB/day) today to 8,000 Exabytes by 2015 which the majority of the growth lead by Big data. He also boasted about Intel technology advantage. For example, Intel introduced High-K Metal Gate technology in 2007 and competitor only got it in products last year (btw Samsung Exynos 5 uses HKMG). They recently introduced Tri-gate technology and they only expect competitors to catch […]

Intel Announces Atom CE5300 Media Processor for STBs and Smart TVs

Intel announced the Atom CE5300 Media Processor (codenamed Berryville) to be used in set-top boxes and smart TVs at IPTV World Forum.  This new processor is the replacement for CE4100, CE4130  and CE4150 media processors used in the D-Link Boxee Box and Sony NSX-24GT1 Google TV. The Intel Atom CE5300 Media Processor is manufactured using 32nm part and features a dual Intel Atom core with support for hyper-threading and virtualization, an advanced 3D/2D graphics engine, integrated power management, and an H.264 B-picture hardware encoder. That’s all we know for now, as Intel did not provide further information such as a product brief for their new SoC. The Amino Freedom Live Media Gateway, an Hybrid/OTT media gateway powered by the Intel Atom CE5300, is currently showcased at IPTV World Forum. This STB also features the latest Opera TV Browser that support HTML5, JavaScript and WebGL technology among other things. Jean-Luc Aufranc […]

Microsoft Unveils Windows 8 Consumer Preview at MWC 2012

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced they would be releasing Windows 8 Consumer Preview at the end of February, and they have done so yesterday with an official announcement at Mobile World Congress 2012, in Barcelona, Spain. During the event, they showcased ARM tablets based on Nvidia Tegra 3, Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 and Texas Instruments OMAP 4/5, as well as tablets, ultrabooks, laptops and touch PCs based on Intel meldfield and clove trail.  All those devices are reference platform for developers and not actual products although Microsoft expect manufacturers to use those reference designs to build their products. The Touch PC used a an interesting screen which could be positioned vertically (like a normal screen). horizontally (like a surface PC) and at an angle for use cases such as an architecture reading a plan or an artist drawing a painting. They also showcased a very large touchscreen that could be used by […]

The Yocto Project Overview and Update – ELC 2012

Saul Wold, User Space Architect at Intel Open Source Technology Center, discusses the latest on the Yocto Project at the Embedded Linux Conference 2012. Abstract: The Yocto Project is a joint project to unify the world’s efforts around embedded Linux and to make Linux the best choice for embedded designs. The Yocto Project is an open source starting point for embedded Linux development which contains tools, templates, methods and actual working code to get started with an embedded device project. In addition, the Yocto Project includes Eclipse plug-ins to assist the developer. This talk gives a walk-through of the key parts of the Yocto Project for developing embedded Linux projects. In addition, features will be described from the latest release of Yocto. At the end of the talk, developers should be able to start their own embedded project using the Yocto Project and use it for developing the next great […]

Android and Tizen on Intel Medfield Atom Z2460 (Video Interview)

Intel announced the MedField Soc (Atom Z2460) targeted at smartphones and tablet and showcased a smartphone reference design running Android based on this platform. Mike Bell GM of Intel’s Mobile Communications Groups (MCG) has been interviewed by EETimes. He talks about Intel entry into the mobile phone market and explains that MedField boasts similar power consumption than top competitors with better performance (3 to 4 times faster in some web browser benchmark). He mainly talks on what they have done to port Android on the platform (and shows Angry Bird a lot) and what you may expect in the future. He also quickly mentioned Tizen. Here’s the original EETimes’ article. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011. www.cnx-software.com

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