Android optimizations for ARM by Linaro Engineers

Posted by Charbax – 07/03/14

Linaro Engineers present a bunch of optimizations they recently did in Android for ARM. These optimizations are in areas like BIONIC for Cortex C string routines, migrating to GCC 4.9, migrating the external projects to their latest versions, optimizing SQLite, optimizing battery life, also they discuss their progress building Android with CLANG, migrating Android to latest versions and how Linaro is planning to release these optimizations to the Android community through Linaro Android releases and upstream them to respective project repositories.

The Android Linaro team’s presentations are live and available on Linaro.org LCA14 and on youtube at LinaraOnAir channel – http://www.youtube.com/user/LinaroOnAir:
LCA14-205: Optimizing SQLite for Android mobile

Qualcomm, Mediatek, ZTE, Allwinner and Comcast join Linaro

Posted by Charbax – 07/03/14

George Grey, CEO of Linaro, the not-for-profit engineering organization consolidating and optimizing open source Linux software and tools for the ARM architecture, announces that Qualcomm, Mediatek, ZTE, AllWinner and Comcast are joining Linaro to work together on bringing Linux on ARM forward together. They are joining the existing Linaro member companies who are ARM, HiSilicon, Broadcom, Fujitsu, LG, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, AMD, AppliedMicro, Canonical, Cavium, Cisco, Citrix, Enea, Facebook, Freescale, HP, LSI, Marvell, Montavista, Nokia Solutions and Networks, Red Hat and IBM who all are contributing engineers to all be working together to improve Linux on ARM for Mobile, Enterprise (servers), Networking, and now also for Home (Set-top-box) usage with the Internet of Things potentially also to be supported. Linaro just held its Linaro Connect Asia here in Macau this week and I will be posting many videos from there, interviewing Linaro engineers about some of the latest Linux hacking work they are doing to speed up all ARM Powered devices.

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Samsung Exynos 5422 Octa-core and Exynos 5260 Hexa-core

Posted by Charbax – 06/03/14

Samsung releases the Exynos5422, their fastest yet Octa-core ARM Processor, with optimized HMP Heterogeneous Multi-processing support with all 8 cores working simultaneously at up to 2.1Ghz reaching something like 20 thousand on Antutu benchmark (which is a lot). The performance for ARM Chromebooks may be extremely high. The Exynos5422 may have more than double the CPU performance over the Exynos5250 of previous generation Chromebooks (according to some online benchmarks for the dual-core Exynos5250 in Nexus 10 compared with the Antutu number Samsung shows for their Octa core Exynos5422 Antutu result), this should provide for some extremely powerful new Samsung ARM Powered Chromebooks! Samsung also announced the 6-core Exynos5260 with 2 big ARM Cortex-A15 cores and 4 LITTLE ARM Cortex-A7 cores, a design that may feed well for the mid-range market perhaps also better for Android Smartphone usage scenarios while the Exynos5422 may be best on Chromebooks that may need higher burst performance. The Samsung Exynos5422 is going to ship in the newly announced $399 Samsung Chromebook 2 with a 13.3″ FHD display, 4GB RAM, 16GB Flash and an ultra-thin and light form factor for a laptop.

50 Billion ARM Processors Shipped

Posted by Charbax – 06/03/14

ARM shipped over 10 billion processors in 2013 alone. From 1990-2008, ARM had shipped one billion processors. The growth of ARM Processor deployments worldwide is accelerating at a crazy pace. About 2 Billion ARM Powered Smartphones are now in use throughout the world. It won’t take long, perhaps just 3 years, for the next 50 billion ARM Processors to be shipped! The official 50 Billion chips videos are here http://armdevices.net/2014/02/26/50-billion-arm-processors-shipped/ and you can read more about it at http://50billionchips.com

MHL 3.0 does 4K playback, 600mbitps USB Host data channel, HDCP 2.2

Posted by Charbax – 05/03/14

MHL demonstrates the amazing Sony Xperia Z2 with 4K output through MHL 3.0 with HDCP 2.2 content protection (required by Hollywood for 4K playback), then they show a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 reference board with Silicon Image Sil8620 doing MHL 3.0 outputting to a MHL 3.0 Docking Board with the SIlicon Image SiI9394 MHL 3.0-to-HDMI 2.0 bridge IC. What’s also really awesome is they can stream fast data through the USB Host ports on the MHL 3.0 Dock and back through the phone. This is absolutely awesome and I have been waiting for this type of 600mbitps bandwidth on USB Host to be added to MHL, thus potentially using Smartphones as desktops and laptops when docked in desktop docks and laptop docks like the Acer Extend featured in my other MHL 3.0 video about productivity: http://armdevices.net/2014/02/28/mhl-for-productivity-acer-extend-mediatek-mt6592-mhl-optimizations-and-dellroku-mhl-hdmi-sticks/

Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet, 6.4mm

Posted by Charbax – 05/03/14

1920×1200 10.1″ display, Android 4.4, 2.3 GHz Qualcomm APQ8074+MSM8974AB, 3GB RAM, 8.1mpix back 2.2mpix front camera. Thin at only 6.4mm and 440 grams in weight, Sony claims the Xperia Z2 Tablet to be the world’s slimmest and lightest waterproof tablet in a 10.1” package.

thl shows 5″ FHD MT6592 with 13mpix front and back, 2700mAh

Posted by Charbax – 05/03/14

Shenzhen THL shows their latest high-end Smartphone on the MT6592 Octa Core, already in mass production with a 5″ 1080p display with Gorilla Glass, selling 200K per month out of their Shenzhen factory. They also show a 4.5″ and 4.7″ qHD on MT6582M and a 6.6″ FHD MT6592 Octa Core phablet.

HEAD acoustics artificial head and torso simulator to measure the sound quality of phones

Posted by Charbax – 04/03/14

They’ve been doing this for 25 years, all the major smartphon companies use this to simulate real phone calls to test the sound quality of phones.

Shenzhen Unitone shows 6″, 7″, 7.85″ MT8389 3G tablets

Posted by Charbax – 04/03/14

Unitone sell 3G tablets from $50 to $100 from 6″, 7″ and 7.85″.

Freescale BSC9132: QorIQ Qonverge BSC9132 Dual-core Processor and Dual-core DSP

Posted by Charbax – 04/03/14

The BSC9132 is a highly integrated device that targets evolving microcell, picocell, and enterprise-femto base station applications. The BSC9132 device combines two e500 cores, built on Power Architecture technology, and two StarCore SC3850 cores with MAPLE-B2P baseband acceleration processing elements to address the need for a high-performance, low-cost, integrated solution that handles all required processing layers without the need for an external device except for an RF transceiver or, in a micro base station configuration, a host device that handles the L3/L4 and handover between sectors.

With primary target air interfaces for LTE-FDD/TDD and WCDMA (HSPA+), the BSC9132 programmable device supports the performance and cost requirements of up to 20 MHz single sector LTE-FDD/TDD by handling 150 Mbps downlink and 75 Mbps uplink rates, 5 MHz HSPA+ by handling 42 Mbps downlink and 11.5 Mbps uplink rates for up to 64 simultaneous users, or WiMAX at 10 MHz. The BSC9132 supports multimode operation that enables it to process LTE-FDD/TDD and HSPA+ users simultaneously.

Text from http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=BSC9132