Pepper Jobs GLK-UC2X Mini PC Review with Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.10

Pepper Jobs GLK-UC2X Teardown heat pipe cooling

Pepper Jobs is a new company led by Ken Wong who was formerly MINIX’s product director and defined many innovative products such as NEO-X series Android media hubs and NEO-Z series Intel-based mini PCs. The first Pepper Jobs designed and released mini PC is the GLK-UC2X targeting small business, 4K home theater, and living room use with an emphasis on low power and great savings on electricity bills. The GLK-UC2X contains an Intel Celeron N4100 Processor Gemini Lake SOC which is a quad-core processor bursting up to 2.40 GHz together with the Intel UHD Graphics 600 processor that is capable of 4K support at 60Hz. It physically consists of an approximately 139mm (5.5″) square case about 33mm (1.3”) tall with a side panel that includes the power button, a couple of USB ports, a Type C USB port and a micro SD card slot with the rest of the ports […]

Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 with Myriad X VPU Finally Announced

Intel Neural Compute Stick 2

Intel Neural Compute Stick was first introduced in early 2017 as a USB compute that allows AI inference at the edge with low power consumption. The stick is based on Myriad Movidius 2 VPU (Vision Processing Unit), and was found to significantly improve inference performance on Raspberry Pi 3 board over a proprietary GPU accelerated solution. However, a little later last year, Intel also announced Movidius Myriad X VPU with claims of up to 10 times DNN performance over Myriad 2 VPU. But so far, we would only see solutions launched with the latter, and it looks like Intel is finally ready to bring Myriad X VPU to the market with the company announcing Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 at Intel’s artificial intelligence (AI) developer conference in Beijing taking place on November 14 and 15. Intel NCS 2 (Neural Compute Stick 2) specifications: Processor – Intel Movidius Myriad X Vision Processing […]

ModBerry M2000 Industrial Computer Features UP Squared Apollo Lake Board

Modberry M2000

TECHBASE has been providing DIN rail mountable Arm and x86 based Modberry industrial computers / IoT gateways for several years. The company has now upgraded ModBerry M1000 model with an Intel Cherry Trail UP board to ModBerry M2000 computer featuring AAEON UP Squared board powered by either an Intel Celeron N3350 dual core processor, or Pentium N4200 quad core processor, both part of Intel’s Apollo Lake family. ModBerry M2000 specifications: SoC (one or other other) Intel Celeron N3350 dual core processor @ 1.10 / 2.40 GHz with Intel HD Graphics 500; 6W TDP Intel Pentium N4200 quad core processor @ 1.10 / 2.50 GHz with Intel HD Graphics 505; 6W TDP System Memory – 2, 4, or 8GB RAM Storage – 16, 32, 64, or 128GB eMMC flash, SATA connector and M.2 SATA socket Video Output – 1x HDMI Connectivity – 2x Gigabit Ethernet, with optional LTE/3G, WiFi, ZigBee, LoRa, […]

UDOO BOLT AMD Ryzen Embedded V1000 SBC Goes for $229 and Up (Crowdfunding)

UDOO-BOLT

While Intel has been outing low cost and low power processors with less than 10W TDP over the years with their Bay Trail, Cherry Trail, Braswell, Apollo Lake, and now Gemini Lake processors, AMD has not really ventured into the low power space, and the latest announcements about 10-12W processors was for their Embedded G-Series J Family, which I have not seen in many products. More recently, the company introduced Ryzen Embedded V1000 family of processors with 4 to 8 Zen cores, 4K support, 10 GbE interface, and more with a TDP of 12 to 25W for Ryzen Embedded V1202B & V1605B dual / quad core processors. The latest x86 UDOO board – dubbed UDOO BOLT – will be one of the rare AMD development boards available on the market with pricing starting at $229. Two versions of the board will be available: UDOO BOLT v3 with Ryzen Embedded V1202B, […]

Run Windows Programs on Android Devices with ExaGear Windows Emulator App

In recent years, there have been efforts to run apps on operating systems they were not designed to run on. For example, Microsoft added Windows Subsystem for Linux to support Linux command line programs  in Windows 10, and Google added the ability to run Android apps to Chrome OS, and is working on Linux programs support for Chromebooks. ExaGear has been providing software to run Windows programs in Linux, including on the Raspberry Pi boards, for several years, but they also published Exagear Windows Emulator – a paid Android app – to run Windows programs in any Android device with appropriate hardware specifications. The virtual machine works on Arm Android devices with with 32-bit x86 Windows applications. You just need to connect a keyboard and a mouse. 64-bit x86 applications and and x86 Android devices are not supported. Some of the supported apps and games include Caesar III, Heroes of […]

USB Burning Tool v2.1.6 for Amlogic Processors Released

Amlogic’s USB Burning Tool is a Windows based tool used to upgrade devices based on Amlogic processors over USB. Most devices now implement OTA firmware updates, so in most cases it is not necessary, but if your device has problem to boot, or want to update to a beta software it is often required, although now it is possible to use a micro SD card with Burn Card Maker. USB Burning Tool is often updated to fix bugs and support new processors, so you may want to check out you have the latest version to avoid any potential issues. Tanix provided a link to USB Burning Tool v2.1.6, which you’ll also find on mirror 1 and mirror 2. The executable will install the drivers and the utility itself. There’s also a changelog in Chinese. The Google Translation of the changelog may be useful to find out if you want to […]

Droplet Computing Aims to Run Apps on any Device (Regardless of the Operating System)

Droplet-Computing

The most popular apps are normally ported to all commonly used operating systems such Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Android and iOS, but apps will a lower user base or older apps may not to ported to all operating systems due to the development time / costs involved. In order to solve this issue, UK based Droplet Computing has introduced Droplet Universal, a patent-pending application container solution that decouples applications from the operating system, and enables applications to run on any device, on- or offline. The solution relies on WebAssembly, and allows you to run the app – placed in a low footprint universal container – from a web browser with Chrome v60 (v62 for Android), Firefox v52, Safari v11, and Edge v16 or greater currently supported. Arm and x86 platform are supported, although it’s not yet possible to run Arm apps on x86 with Droplet Universal. It’s hard to know […]

HEIF Image Container Format Leverages H.265/HEVC to Store Photos and Image Sequences

HEIF-vs-animated-GIF-Large

A few years ago, Google introduced WebP image format leveraging VP8 video codec, and the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) has decided to do something similar but instead of using VP8, they went with their own H.265/HEVC video codec for HEIF image container format. HEIF stands for High Efficiency Image File, and is defined by ISO/IEC 23008-12 (MPEG-H Part 12). The storage of the data is based on ISO Base Media File Format (ISOBMFF), and HEIF appears to be especially useful to replace animated GIFs file with better quality and much lower sizes, as well as burst photos. HEIF also appears to compress a little better than JPEG photo with similar quality, but HEIF appears to fallback to JPEG codec sometimes, so it may be improvement in the way metadata is handled? The comparison table show the different features between HEIF and other well-known image format (JEG, WebP, GIF, etc…). […]