Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment on Qualcomm Unveils Snapdragon 865, 765, and 765G 5G Mobile Platforms

Qualcomm Unveils Snapdragon 865, 765, and 765G 5G Mobile Platforms

Qualcomm-Snapdragon 865 / 765 5G Mobile Platform

Qualcomm Snapdragon Tech Summit 2019 is taking place in Maui, Hawaii, US on December 3-5, and the company announced three 5G mobile platforms at the event: Snapdragon 865 with Qualcomm Kryo 585 CPU, Adreno 650 GPU, and external Snapdragon X55 5G modem up to 7.5 Gbps download Snapdragon 765 with Qualcomm Kryo 475 CPU, Adreno 620 GPU, and external Snapdragon X52 5G modem up to 3.75 Gbps download Snapdragon 765G where G stands for Gaming and the SoC comes with a speed-binned Qualcomm Kryo 475 CPU, while the Qualcomm Adreno 620 GPU provides 10% faster graphics rendering compared to the standard Snapdragon 765. Snapdragon 865 5G Mobile Platform SM8250 specifications provided by Qualcomm: CPU – Octa-core Kryo 585 up to 2.84 GHz GPU – Adreno 650  CPU with support for Vulkan 1.1 API, OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenGL 2.0 FP, 10-bit HDR gaming, hardware-accelerated H.265, and VP9 decoder DSP – Hexagon 698 with Hexagon Tensor Accelerator, Vector eXtensions, and Scalar Accelerator …

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Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment on Desklab Ultrathin, Lightweight 15.6″ 4K Portable Touchscreen Display Comes HDMI, USB-C, Stereo Speakers (Crowdfunding)

Desklab Ultrathin, Lightweight 15.6″ 4K Portable Touchscreen Display Comes HDMI, USB-C, Stereo Speakers (Crowdfunding)

Desklab Laptop Companion

We’ve already seen a fair amount of portable displays launched in recent years which are often supposed to be brought along with your laptop or smartphone, including DUO add-on display, TAIHE Gemini 15.6″ FullHD/4K display, and the low-cost BlitzWolf BW-PCM1 11.6″ display among many others. Another option is Desklab 15.6″ portable display available either in Full HD or 4K resolution and which comes with stereo speakers in a similar fashion to the TAIHE model but with different ports, and no battery. Desklab key features and specifications: Display 15.6″ IPS touchscreen display with FullHD (1920×1080) or 4K (3840×2160) resolution 10ms response time 400 cd/m2 luminance 183° viewing angles Ports mini HDMI input 2x USB typ-C ports 3.5mm audio jack Micro USB port Audio – Stereo speakers Misc – Power button, volume rocker Battery – None, used the host battery Thickness – ~0.6 cm Weight – 595 grams Since the display comes with both HDMI and USB-C ports it can support most …

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Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments on ROCK PI N10 RK3399Pro SBC Sells for $99 and up

ROCK PI N10 RK3399Pro SBC Sells for $99 and up

Rock Pi N10 RK3399Pro SBC

Rockchip RK3399Pro processor is based on the popular Rockchip RK3399Pro hexa-core Arm Cortex-A72/A53 processor plus an embedded neural processing unit (NPU) delivering up to 3 TOPS for AI acceleration. So far you had to spend over $200 to get either Toybrick RK3399Pro board or 96Boards RK3399Pro development kit to get started with the processor. Some other companies announced their own RK3399Pro SBC such as Pine64  RockPro64-AI, or Khadas Edge board, but those are not available yet. But there’s now a more affordable Rockchip RK3399Pro SBC courtesy of Radxa’s  Rock Pi N10 available on Seeed Studio in three variants: $99 model A with 4GB RAM (3GB for CPU/GPU + 1GB for NPU), 16GB eMMC flash $129 model B with 6GB RAM (4GB for CPU/GPU + 2GB for NPU), 32GB eMMC flash $169 model C with 8GB RAM (4GB for CPU/GPU + 4GB for NPU), 64GB eMMC flash Rock Pi N10 specifications: SoC – Rochchip RK3399Pro hexa-core big.LITTLE processor with 2x Cortex …

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Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments on Think Silicon NEOX|V is the First RISC-V ISA based GPU

Think Silicon NEOX|V is the First RISC-V ISA based GPU

RISC-V GPU

We are seeing more and more RISC-V microcontrollers and processors hitting the market, but so far they all lacked a GPU for 3D graphics acceleration. Think Silicon, the make of NEMA GPU for IoT and wearables, has now announced it will demonstrate NEOX|V GPU, the first RISC-V ISA based 3D, at the RISC-V Summit at the San Jose Convention Center, on December 10-12, in San Jose, California. NEOX|V key features: Parallel multi-core and multi-threaded architecture based on the RISC-V64GC ISA instruction set with adaptive NoC (Networks-on-Chip) Configurable from 4 to 64 cores Variety of cache sizes and thread counts organized in 1 to 16 cluster elements Variety of cluster/core configurations with compute power ranging from 12.8 to 409.6 GFLOPS at 800 MHz Support for FP16, FP32, and FP64 plus SIMD instructions Beside 3D graphics, the RISC-V GPU can also be used for machine learning, vision/video processing, and open GPGPU compute framework applications. NEOX|V SDK features System Verilog RTL, Integration Tests, …

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Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments on AWS EC2 6th Gen Instances are 7x Faster thanks to Graviton 2 Arm Neoverse N1 Custom Processor

AWS EC2 6th Gen Instances are 7x Faster thanks to Graviton 2 Arm Neoverse N1 Custom Processor

AWS ECS2 Graviton 2 Instances

Last year Amazon introduced their first 64-bit Arm-based ECS2 “A1” instances which were found to deliver up to 45% cost savings over x86 Instances for the right workloads. A few months ago, AWS (Amazon Web Services) provides a new offering with bare-metal A1 instances, and with re:invent 2019 now taking place the company has unveiled AWS ECS2 6th generation Arm instances (which they did not call A2 instances yet) powered by Graviton 2 processor comprised of custom Arm Neoverse N1 cores and promising up to 7x the performance of the original A1 instances. There will be three types of Graviton2-powered EC2 instances with the d suffix indicating NVMe local storage: M6g and M6gd for General Purpose workloads (application servers, mid-size data stores, microservices, and cluster computing) with 1 to 64 vCPUs and up to 256 GB of memory. C6g and C6gd for Compute-Optimized workloads (high-performance computing, video encoding, gaming, and CPU-based machine learning inference acceleration) with 1 to 64 vCPUs …

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Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments on Sony Spresense 6-core MCU Development Board Now Supports Java

Sony Spresense 6-core MCU Development Board Now Supports Java

Sony Spresense board was introduced in spring 2018 with a 6-core Cortex-M4 microcontroller from the company, GPS & GLONASS, as well as audio support. The breadboard-compatible board could also be inserted into an Arduino UNO R3 compatible base board, and Sony offered support for both the Arduino IDE and a C-based NuttX-based SDK. You’ll find some more details and photos in our “review”. Sony has now partnered with MicroEJ to provide developers with Java support on Spresense board through MicroEJ Virtual Execution Environment (VEE). A Java simulator (VEE Virtual Device) allows you to develop software for Spresense independently of the hardware. Beside plenty of libraries, MicroEJ VEE features MEJ32 32-bit virtual core is compatible with various architectures including ARM Cortex-M, ARM Cortex-Ax, RX, V85, MIPS32, TriCore, and Tensilica. Java enables application portability which means that any GUI/IoT/Security or application code can run on various embedded systems supported by MicroEJ VEE. There are three main tools for developers: MicroEJ SDK to …

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Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments on Western Digital Made RISC-V Linux & BusyBox Boot on Sipeed Maix Go Board

Western Digital Made RISC-V Linux & BusyBox Boot on Sipeed Maix Go Board

The other day we wrote about Getting Started with Embedded Linux on RISC-V in QEMU emulator and noted that Linux capable RISC-V hardware is currently fairly expensive. We also mentioned there was work on porting uCLinux to Kendryte K210 RISC-V processor on boards such as Sipeed Maix board. The processor only comes with 8MB RAM, and does not feature an MMU (Memory Management Unit) so what you’d be able to do on the board would be limited, and for instance, a desktop environment is clearly impossible on the platform. NOMMU support also requires some extra work, and in Linux 5.4 we saw only of the changes was “SiFive PLIC IRQ chip modifications, in preparation for M-mode Linux”. The slide above is extracted from the “RISC-V NOMMU and M-Mode Linux” presentation by Damien Le Moal, Western Digital at the Linux Plumbers Conference 2019 last September. It explains M-mode support is better suited for NOMMU mode since more direct access to the …

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Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments on Imagination Unveils IMG A-Series GPU Designed For Everything from IoT to Mobile and Server

Imagination Unveils IMG A-Series GPU Designed For Everything from IoT to Mobile and Server

IMG A-Series GPU

Imagination Technologies has just launched IMG A-Series GPU which they claim is “The GPU of Everything” and “The fastest GPU IP ever”. IMG A-Series can be customized and scaled for various applications & markets from automotive, AIoT, set-top box, mobile, and server.  Compared to the company’s earlier PowerVR 9Series GPU, IMG A-Series GPU delivers 2.5 times more performance, eight times faster AI processor, and 60% less power while running complex content with the same process node, area, and under similar conditions. IMG A-Series GPU supports the latest API standards including OpenGL ES, Vulkan, OpenCL, and Imagination provides a Unified AI API for use in combination with PowerVR neural network accelerators. It also offers 5x performance density compared to the best current shipping PowerVR devices and supports PVRIC4 lossless or virtually-lossless compression guaranteeing a 50% bandwidth and footprint reduction. The new GPU also leverages HyperLane Technology with up to eight individual, isolated hardware control lanes for multizone hardware virtualization leading to …

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