$600 Windows Dev Kit 2023 is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 processor

Windows Dev Kit 2023

Microsoft has just introduced the Windows Dev Kit 2023, that’s basically a Windows 11 Arm mini PC powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 processor designed for developers of Windows programs. Previously known as “Project Volterra”, the system comes with 32GB RAM, 512GB NVMe storage, mini DP video output, Ethernet, WiFi 6, and Bluetooth 5.1 connectivity, as well as five USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, and more. Windows Dev Kit 2023 specifications: SoC – Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 compute platform with CPU – 4x 3.0 GHz Prime cores, 4x 2.4 GHz Efficiency Cores GPU – Unnamed Adreno GPU with DirectX 12 (DX12) API support DSP – Qualcomm Hexagon Processor, Qualcomm Sensing Hub AI – Qualcomm Neural Processing Engine SDK support for AI (up to 29+ TOPS) System Memory – 32GB LPDDR4x RAM Storage – 512GB NVMe SSD Video Output – Mini DisplayPort (mini DP) with support for HBR2 […]

Android 13 is already working on Qualcomm Robotics RB3 and RB5 platforms

Qualcomm Robotics RB5 Android 13

Qualcomm Robotics RB3 (aka DragonBoard 845c) and Robotics RB5 boards can already support Android 13, just a few days after the source code was pushed to AOSP (Android Open Source Project). Once upon a time (i.e. a few years ago), it would have taken weeks, and more likely months, to port the latest version of Android (AOSP) to a specific single board computer. But thanks to initiatives such as Project Treble, Android reference boards such as DragonBoard 845c (RB3), HiKey 960, Khadas VIM3, and Qualcomm Robotics Board RB5 can now get the latest version of Android up and running in a matter of days. Android 13 was released on August 15, and Linaro wrote about RB3 and RB5 support on August 18, and while Linaro engineers collaborated with Google engineers before the AOSP, it is still an impressive feat. Amit Pundir, Linaro Engineer, explains how this was made possible: Over […]

Qualcomm Snapdragon W5+ and W5 wearables platforms promise higher efficiency and performance

Snapdragon W5+ Block Diagram

It’s been a while since Qualcomm released a new platform for wearables. More exactly, the Snapdragon 4100 platform was announced a little over two years ago, and now Qualcomm has just introduced the Snapdragon W5+ and W5 Gen 1 platforms with up to 50% longer battery, twice the performance, and 30 percent smaller size. Just like the Snapdragon 4100, the Snapdragon W5 comes with four Arm Cortex-A53 processor (SW5100), but is clocked at 1.7 GHz and manufactured with a 4nm process, while the always-on (AON) co-processor is upgraded from a Cortex-M0 chip to the QCC5100 Cortex-M55 chip manufactured with a 22nm process.     Snapdragon W5+/W5 specifications: W5100 SoC CPU – Quad-core Cortex-A53 processor @ up to 1.7 GHz GPU – Qualcomm Adreno A702 @ up to 1 GHz with OpenGL ES 3.1 API support DSP – Qualcomm Hexagon DSP V66K System Memory – 16-bit LPDDR4 up to 2,133 MHz […]

Lightweight wireless AR Smart Viewer reference design is powered by Snapdragon XR2 platform

Snapdragon XR2 wireless AR smart viewer reference design

Qualcomm unveiled a new Wireless AR Smart Viewer Reference Design powered by the Snapdragon XR2 platform last week with very few details, but the company has now demonstrated the system to some members of the press, so let’s have a closer look. The reference design aims to provide a similar level of performance as a headset connected to PC or premium smartphone, but with some of the processing offloaded to the Snapdragon XR2 processor, thereby eliminating the need for a cord while still achieving lag-free experiences in combination with the Qualcomm FastConnect 6900 WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3 solution. It is supposed to offer a 40% thinner profile and a more balanced weight distribution than the earlier Snapdragon XR1 smart glasses reference design.   Wireless AR Smart Viewer reference design specifications: SoC – Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 with Octa-core processor with 1x Kryo Gold prime @ 2.84 GHz + 3x Kryo […]

Linux 5.18 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux 5.18 release arm risc-v mips

Linux 5.18 is out! Linus Torvalds has just announced the release on lkml: No unexpected nasty surprises this last week, so here we go with the 5.18 release right on schedule. That obviously means that the merge window for 5.19 will open tomorrow, and I already have a few pull requests pending. Thank you everybody. I’d still like people to run boring old plain 5.18 just to check, before we start with the excitement of all the new features for the merge window. The full shortlog for the last week is below, and nothing really odd stands out. The diffstat looks a bit funny – unusually we have parsic architecture patches being a big part of it due to some last-minute cache flushing fixes, but that is probably more indicative of everything else being pretty small. So outside of the parisc fixes, there’s random driver updates (mellanox mlx5 stands out, […]

Qualcomm Wi-Fi 7 Networking Pro Series SoCs support up to 33 Gbps PHY rate, up to 2,000 clients

Qualcomm Wi-Fi 7 networking pro

Qualcomm has announced the Wi-Fi 7 capable Qualcomm Networking Pro Series Gen 3 family designed for routers and access points with a PHY rate up to 33 Gbps with the quad-band 16-stream Networking Pro 1620 platform and offers some competition to the recently announced Broadcom WiFi 7 access point chips. The company will also offer the tri-band 12-stream Networking Pro 1220 with up to 21.6 Gbps aggregated link rate, the quad-band 8-stream Networking Pro 820 capable of 16.5 Gbps PHY rate, and at the low-end of the scale, the Networking Pro 620 limited to 10.8 Gbps with three bands and six streams. Qualcomm Networking Pro 1620 (IPQ9574) platform specifications: CPU – Quad-core Arm Cortex-A73 @ 2.2 GHz System Memory – DDR3L, DDR4 16/32-bit Storage –  eMMC, NAND, Serial NOR, SD/eMMC Networking Wired – 6 Port Integrated Ethernet Switch 4 x 2.5 GbE + 5 GbE + 10 GbE Wireless Wi-Fi […]

Linux 5.17 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux 5.17 changelog

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.17: So we had an extra week of at the end of this release cycle, and I’m happy to report that it was very calm indeed. We could probably have skipped it with not a lot of downside, but we did get a few last-minute reverts and fixes in and avoid some brown-paper bugs that would otherwise have been stable fodder, so it’s all good. And that calm last week can very much be seen from the appended shortlog – there really aren’t a lot of commits in here, and it’s all pretty small. Most of it is in drivers (net, usb, drm), with some core networking, and some tooling updates too. It really is small enough that you can just scroll through the details below, and the one-liner summaries will give a good flavor of what happened last week. Of course, this means […]

UCIe (Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express) open standard for Chiplets with heterogeneous chips

UCIe Open Chiplet platform-on-a-package

We first heard about Chiplet, chips that gather IP or chips from different vendors into a single chip, in 2020 with the now-defunct zGlue’s Open Chiplet Initiative, but the term recently came back to the forefront last month with Intel’s investment into the “Open Chiplet Platform” that aims to offer a modular approach to chip design through chiplets with each block/chiplet customized for a particular function. It turns out there’s now an official standard called the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) whose specification defines the interconnect between chiplets within a package, and not only backed by Intel, but also AMD, Arm, ASE, Google Cloud, Meta, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung, and TSMC. UCIe defines the Physical Layer (Die-to-Die I/O) and protocols to be used for the chiplet interfaces, currently PCIe and CXL (Compute Express Link), but more protocols will be added to the specification in the future. The goal is to provide […]

EDATEC Raspberry Pi 5 fanless case