Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment on ARM TechCon 2015 Schedule – IoT, Servers, 64-bit ARM, Power Usage Optimization, and More

ARM TechCon 2015 Schedule – IoT, Servers, 64-bit ARM, Power Usage Optimization, and More

The ARM Technology Conference (ARM TechCon) will take place on November 10 – 12, 2015, in Santa Clara Convention Center, and just like every year, there will be a free exposition for companies to showcase their latest innovation and/or products, as well as a technical conference with sessions and workshops sorted into various tracks: Automotive/Embedded Vision Embedded IoT Mobile/Connectivity Networking Infrastructure/Servers Tools & Implementation Wearables/Sensors ARM Training Day Sponsored Vendor Training Special Event General Event Software Developers Workshop You can find the complete schedule on ARM TechCon website. Although I won’t attend, I’ve created my own virtual schedule with some of the sessions I found interesting. Tuesday – November 10 8:30 – 9:20 – ARM Vision for Thermal Management and Energy Aware Scheduling on Linux by Ian Rickards (ARM), Charles Garcia-Tobin (ARM), Bobby Batacharia (ARM) This talk will cover the history and where are we going, for ARM’s Power Software (IPA, EAS, and some concepts for the future). ARM will detail …

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Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments on Cavium ThunderX Server SoC Features up to 48 ARM 64-bit Cores

Cavium ThunderX Server SoC Features up to 48 ARM 64-bit Cores

ARM SBSA specification for server supports up to 268,435,456 CPU cores for the second level of standardization on one or a combination of SoCs. We’re not quite up there just yet, but Cavium ThunderX is an ARM server SoC with up to 48 cores on a single chip, which is the highest number of cores I’ve ever heard of in an ARM SoC. The company created their own custom processor cores using an ARMv8 architecture license, designing an SoC complies with ARM’s Server Base System Architecture (SBSA) standard with the following key features: ARM based SoC that scales up from 8 to 48 cores with up to 2.5 GHz core frequency with 78K I-Cache, 32K D-Cache, and 16MB L2 cache. Fully cache coherent across dual sockets using Cavium Coherent Processor Interconnect (CCPI) Integrated I/O capacity with 100s of Gigabits of I/O bandwidth 4x DDR3/4 72-bit memory controllers supporting up to 1TB RAM @ 2400 MHz in a dual socket configuration Hundreds of …

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Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments on ARM Unveils Server Base System Architecture Specification (SBSA) to Standardize ARM based Servers

ARM Unveils Server Base System Architecture Specification (SBSA) to Standardize ARM based Servers

64-bit ARM based servers should hit the market later this year or earlier in 2015 with SoCs such as Applied Micro X-Gene or AMD Opteron A1100. ARM still has the lead in terms of efficiency with a lower dollar per watt ratio, but Intel is closing in with their new Avoton server-on-chips. However, there’s one aspect where Intel is clearly in the lead: standardization and compatibility. ARM is very flexible, and allow SoC designers to create more or less what they want, but it comes at the cost that most ARM based systems are not capable of running mainline Linux, and instead use vendor trees.  With many applications, that may not be critical, but when it comes to data-centers, companies want to be able to run the latest Linux version with the latest security patches as soon as possible, and want to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO), so they don’t want to spend considerable resources to handle different …

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Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments on Cloud Media 1OTT Internet Media Player Runs Linux on Cavium ARM11 SoC

Cloud Media 1OTT Internet Media Player Runs Linux on Cavium ARM11 SoC

Cloud Media is mostly known for their Linux based Pop Corn Hour media players. but recently they started offered a free media player called FreeOTT via ISPs or Facebook giveaways. This little box gives direct access to online video channels. I reviewed FreeOTT a few months ago, and found the interface to be sluggish (possibly because of my Internet connection), audio was not working on my TV. So overall not a very good experience from my side, but they’ve upgraded the firmware with features like Miracast, DLNA, and “iOSCast” (Airplay?), possible improving performance, and recently added CCTV 1 to 15, except CCTV 4, to the list of channels. FreeOTT was difficult to source since you can only get it for free, so the company has just launched 1OTT player based on what appears to be the same hardware platform, but with a larger enclosure. 1OTT Specifications: Media Processor – Cavium CELESTIAL CNC1800L ARM11 @ 640 MHz System Memory – 256MB DDR3 …

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Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments on ARM Based Servers and Servers-on-a-Chip (SoCs) at ARM Techcon 2013

ARM Based Servers and Servers-on-a-Chip (SoCs) at ARM Techcon 2013

ARM Techcon 2013 took place on October 29 – 31, 2013, in Santa Clara, and several companies announced servers, or chips for server based on ARM technology. None of those are for home used, but for now ARM based servers target enterprise and cloud data. Yet end users may them indirectly when they access social networks such as Facebook, or other online services such as Paypal. Calxeda ECX-2000 SoC After their ECX-1000 quad core Cortex A9 Server-on-chip, Calxeda has announced ECX-2000 SoC featuring four Cortex A15 cores. The new SoC provides about twice the performance, 3 times the memory bandwidth, and 4 times the memory capacity (up to 16GB RAM) of the earlier chip.   One of the key advantage of Cortex A15 over Cortex A9 is hardware virtualization that allows support for KVM and Xen hypervisors. ECX-2000 is supported in Canonical Ubuntu Linux 13.10 and can run Havana Openstack. Other key features include: On-chip Fabric Switch connects SoCs through low-latency …

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Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments on Cloud Media FreeOTT Player Review

Cloud Media FreeOTT Player Review

Syabas was a company designing set-top boxes such as Popcorn Hour Media Tank that were relatively popular before the Android media player invasion. The company is now called Cloud Media, and they offer a tiny media player called FreeOTT that connects to their Apps Market and bring online video, Internet radio, social media and other streaming media to your television. The device is free (as in free beer), as it’s not actually available for sale to the general public, and the only ways to get it is to have your ISP or telecom provider set it to you, or win one from the regular giveaways organized by the company. I won one via a giveaway announced on their Facebook page, and I had just to pay $5 (via Paypal) for shipping. The company does not provide detailed specifications for their device but we do know it’s a Linux based media player powered by an ARM11 processor, with 256MB RAM and …

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