Posted on

Renesas R-Car H1 Automotive SoC

Renesas announced the R-Car H1, their new automotice SoC with 4 Cortex-A9 cores clocked at 1GHz and Imagination Technologies’ SGX-543-MP2 graphics processing unit (GPU) aimed at high-end navigation systems. It also features a Renesas SH-4A high-reliability real-time processing CPU core acting as a multimedia engine (MME) . The R-Car H1 SoC can also powered with Renesas’ IMP-X3 core (optional), a real-time image processing unit that enables developers to implement augmented reality application such as  360-degree camera views (Thanks to up to four independent input camera channels) and sign recognition. Here’s an excerpt of the press release: Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723) and its subsidiary, Renesas Mobile Corporation, today announced a new member of the R-Car series of automotive systems-on-chip (SoCs), the R-Car H1, capable of delivering up to 11,650 Dhrystone MIPS (DMIPS), and ideal for the high-end car navigation market. The R-Car H1 SoC offers an innovative architecture where the application […]

Posted on

AMD G-Series Based Mini-ITX: Advantech AIMB223

Advantech announced a mini-ITX board – AIMB223 – featuring AMD G-Series processors: T56N (dual core @ 1.65 GHz)), T40E (dual core @ 1GHz) and T44R (single core @ 1.2 GHz). The AIMB-223 board comes with up to 4GB of DDR3 SDRAM, PCI and PCI Express expansion, four SATA III interfaces, gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0 and more. That’s yet another mini-ITX board based on AMD G-Series such has the iBase MI958 or the Fujitsu D3003-0x.  The relative proliferation of mini-ITX board based on AMD embedded processors is probably due to the fact that AMD provides a Mini-ITX Reference Design. Here are the specifications of the board: Processor: AMD G-Series T56N (1.65GHz – dual-core – 18W TDP) or AMD G-Series T40E (1GHz – dual core – 6W TDP) or AMD G-Series T44R (1.2GHz – single core – 9W TDP) Chipset: AMD A55E Memory: up to 4GB of DDR3 SDRAM Expansion Slots: 1 […]

ArmSoM RK3588 AIModule7 NVIDIA Jetson Nano-compatible SOM
Posted on

ARM Unveils Cortex-A7 and big.LITTLE processing

ARM unveiled the Cortex A7, a new core with higher performance than the Cortex A8 (1.5x) and with 5 times less power consumption. It will be used in conjunction with Cortex-A15 Core and allows big.LITTLE processing where the Cortex A7 (companion core) takes care of the low performance, low power tasks (social network, email, SMS, phone calls) and the Cortex A15 kicks in for high performance tasks such as video processing and gaming. Here’s an excerpt of the Cortex A7 / big.LITTLE processing press release: ARM today announced the ARM® Cortex™-A7 MPCore™ processor – the most energy-efficient application class processor ARM has ever developed, and big.LITTLE processing – a flexible approach that redefines the traditional power and performance relationship. The Cortex-A7 processor builds on the low-power leadership established by the Cortex-A8 processor that is at the heart of many of today’s most popular smartphones. A single Cortex-A7 processor delivers 5x […]

Posted on

Android 4.0 SDK and Platform Highlights

Google has just released Android 4.0 (ICS) preview SDK and platform highlights. Android 4.0 Highlights Summary New User Features: Refined, evolved UI – Common action more visible, new typeface, improved multitaksing and notifications. Home screen folders and favorites tray – New home screen folders offer a new way for users to group their apps and shortcuts logically. Resizable widgets – Interactive widgets are resizable, so users can expand them to show more content or shrink them to save space New lock screen actions – The lock screens now let users do more without unlocking such as accessing the camera app. Quick responses for incoming calls – Respond by pre-written SMS if you are busy during a call Swipe to dismiss notifications, tasks, and browser tabs Improved text input and spell-checking – The softkeyboard now comes with a spell-checker and can automatically correct typos. Powerful voice input engine – Talk to […]

Posted on

Delete Old Revisions to Reduce Time to First Byte for WordPress Blogs

I’ve already implemented several steps to improve this blog performance: Install W3 Total Cache plugin. Register to CloudFlare CDN to reduce the load on the server. Those two work pretty well, but there was still a problem with the Time to First Byte according to http://www.webpagetest.org. It got an F mark for First Byte Time. Sometimes I would get TTFB (Time To First Byte) of 20 seconds and more. TTFB is synonym of slow back-end processing either because of poorly optimized software or insufficient hardware specs or both. Part of the problem is probably due to my hosting provider (I use a shared hosting) and I sometimes get very high server load in CPanel (e.g. 50 (4 cpus)) whether my blog is running or not. But I found a blog post explaining how to try to reduce the TTFB for WordPress blog by installing Better Delete Revision plugin in order […]

Posted on

Google and Samsung Galaxy Nexus Android 4.0 Smartphone

Samsung and Google jointly announced the very first Android 4.0 (ICS) smartphone in Hong Kong. They did not get too original to name the device. Remember the Nexus S and Galaxy S series? Well, the smartphone is named Galaxy Nexus. The phone features a dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP4460 processor, a 4.65″ super AMOLED plus display (1280×720),  LTE/HSPA+ network support, 1080p video recoding, NFC, barometer and more. It will be sold in the US, Europe and Asia (including Japan and China) in November. After Samsung showcased the smartphone, Google presented the new Android 4.0 (ICS). 3 Design principles: Beautiful: Enchant me Easy: Simplify my life Powerful and Smart Here are the main points I gatherer of Android 4 presentation: The new UI uses the Roboto font. They removed the physical buttons on the smartphone. Everything is now done with gestures. It looks like Honeycomb for smartphone with stacks and widgets. Widgets […]

Rockchip RK3568, RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs and SoMs in 2025
Posted on

Using Raspberry Pi as an Internet Kiosk

Following up on this morning post explaining how to get the kernel and minimal rootfs to run debian in qemu emulating an ARM1176 processor, I’ll show how to make a minimal rootfs to run Chrome browser in this platform. I tested it in QEMU, but this should also run on the Raspberry Pi hardware. First, you’ll have to complete the step I provided in Raspberry Pi Emulator in Ubuntu with Qemu. Start qemu: sudo qemu-system-arm -M versatilepb -cpu arm1176 -m 256 -hda rootfs.ext2 -kernel zImage -append “root=/dev/sda” -serial stdio Once you login to the console as root, create a new user (e.g guest): adduser guest This user will be needed to login with the graphical interface and ssh. In order to get an Internet Kiosk, we’ll need a web browser (Chromium) and a window manger. I chose fluxbox instead of gnome because of the size difference (8651 KB vs 1739 […]

Posted on

Archos 80/101 G9 Firmware Version 3.2.56 Released

Archos has just released a new firmware for Archos 80 G9 / 101 G9. Here’s the changelog: Version 3.2.56 – October 14th, 2011  Android browser: add support for new browsing modes in settings (using various tablet/desktop user agents) Network shares: improve browsing behavior robustness and mounting reliability Memory management: reduce time for an application to load Wi-Fi: achieve faster reconnect Wi-Fi: fix mobile access point support Accessories: add support for some USB Ethernet adapters (chipsets: RTL8150, ASIX AX88xxx, Davicom DM9601, SMSC LAN75xx, SMSC LAN95xx, NetChip 1080, MosChip MCS7830) on micro USB port Video: fix sound being lost sometimes while playing and need to seek/play/pause to recover it Filebrowser: make it usable with Archos remote application Battery: apply less intrusive low battery warnings Keyboard: no need to reboot to apply keyboard layout The firmware can be downloaded at http://update.archos.com/9/gen9/gen9_3.2.56/firmware_archos_it4.aos

Boardcon CM3588 Rockchip RK3588 System-on-Module designed for AI and IoT applications