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WebM might eventually become the main video codec for the web, it’s Google’s open source video codec now being hardware accelerated by ARM Processor vendors such as Texas Instruments here demonstrating WebM 1080p playback on the upcoming OMAP4 ARM Cortex-A9 processor in both Android and Ubuntu:
Source: blog.webmproject.org
Found via: netbooknews.com
Linutop sells small, silent and low power PCs based on AMD Geode and VIA C7 processors to use in business and industrial environments. Now they are launching Linutop OS 4.0 that anyone can download at http://www.linutop.com/software/download.en.html to boot from a USB stick or CD/DVD on any x86 computer. They are also considering providing this solution for ARM Powered desktop systems as soon as several popular low-cost designs are released. This video features Linutop founder and CEO Frederic Baille talking about Linutop and a screencast to show the principal features of this OS.
If you are an ARM Powered mobile computing app developer, if you want to prepare OS and apps for TI’s upcoming ARM Cortex-A9 platform, shipping from around the end of November, you can pre-order the PandaBoard now for $174 at http://pandaboard.org.
OMAP4430 Processor (Highlights)
Dual-core ARM® Cortex™-A9 MPCore™ with Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) at 1Ghz each. Allows for 150% performance increase over previous ARM Cortex-A8 cores.
Full HD (1080p) multi-standard video encode/decode
Imagination Technologies’ POWERVR™ SGX540 graphics core supporting all major API’s including OpenGL® ES v2.0, OpenGL ES v1.1, OpenVG v1.1 and EGL v1.3 and delivering 2x sustained performance compared to the previous SGX530 core
Low power audio (upto 140+ hr CD-quality audio playback)
ARM Cortex-A9 as in this OMAP4 may be the ARM Processor generation that we have been waiting for to realize full ARM Powered desktop performance in devices such as for Laptops, Desktops, set-top-boxes for HDTVs and other high resolution full desktop user experiences. So this new processor is not only about speeding up Smart Phones, it’s also to start supporting higher resolution larger screen devices and provide ARM Powered full computing as credible challenger to x86. The OMAPvideo YouTube channel is releasing some videos to demonstrate PandaBoard’s setup and performance, here is a video of Ubuntu 10.10 booting on this development board:
At mobile world congress, a TI spokesperson told me after I filmed my OMAP4 demonstrations video, that real-time video encode on OMAP4 is within 2% of x86 based multi-pass encoding. I wonder if that is really true, or if he meant within 2% only for real-time encoding.
Hopefully 1080p playback on OMAP4 is impeccable, so 1080p high profile at very high bitrates h264 and mkv works fine so Boxee type people can’t complain like they complained on video playback performance on Tegra 2 so it isn’t mysteriously replaced with Intel CE4100.
Source: pandaboard.org and OMAPvideo on YouTube
Found via: blogarm.net
In this video, Jerone Young, Partner Engineer at Canonical explains the status of software optimizations and development to make ARM Powered Laptops and Desktops a reality. He tells about some of the fascinating challenges where Canonical is working together with the their partners at the Linaro group of companies (ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST Ericsson, Texas Instruments…) to realize a full desktop experience on ARM Powered devices, including full and fast web browsing and full access to most of the most useful Ubuntu applications.
It’s about hardware acceleration, about standardization of boot process and other aspects of the ARM platforms, this is about focusing development efforts to solve the most important challenges and provide thus open source and free software tools to be used by all ARM Powered Linux based products. With faster memory bus speeds coming up in the next generation of Desktop-centric ARM Processors, such as support for DDR3 RAM speeds, the implementation of multiple cores as in upcoming ARM Cortex A9 processors, the standardization of how to use graphics and video hardware acceleration to speed up user interfaces, applications and features. Those are the challenges that Canonical and its partners are working very hard on and plan to implement in actual products that can start to be sold to the mass market during these coming months.
As you have been able to see in hundreds of videos here on ARMdevices.net, many, many prototypes of ARM Powered laptops are being shown at trade shows. Huge laptop makers like HP, Toshiba, Dell, Lenovo, Quanta, Compal, Inventec, Pegatron, all of those and many more have shown or have announced ARM Powered laptop projects. Yet to actually launch these to a very large market, the ARM Partners are first collaboratively making sure that those devices provide a user experience that is fast enough for most consumers.
This story as discussed on Slashdot: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/07/06/1256252/Surveying-the-Challenges-of-Linux-On-Cortex-A9-Based-Laptops
Genesi Americas is presenting this awesome looking ARM Cortex A8 based Smartbook design, presented by Genesi who designed the hardware in collaboration with Pegatron of this latest generation of this Freescale Powered Smartbook design. For fun, we are running Microsoft Office through a high resolution version of Citrix viewer on the latest version of Ubuntu 10.4 for ARM processors. This could provide a one click online based software as a service solution. Want to run any X86 application on your ARM Laptop? Just click through the Citrix virtualization stuff and you can have it all running and smoothly. In theory, the apps could be processed by a grid and delivered much faster than on a single x86 processor based device.
Genesi are providing the hardware and software integration solution, in combination with Future Electronics, they can provide the whole solution to carriers, distributors, with the full bill of material, setting up the manufacturing and making the whole thing work and be sold to the market.
Genesi’s main IP is their Aura firmware solution:
Aura, the Genesi Firmware offering, implements a run-time, re-entrant hardware abstraction layer supporting the industry standard IEEE 1275 (OpenFirmware) and UEFI firmware specifications, with significant added functionality.
These additional features provide cost reduction of systems and faster time-to-market of hardware. Genesi provides board bring-up services and firmware for other Power Architecture and ARM hardware suppliers, up to and including a Linux desktop, based on our firmware.
Genesi is an active Open Source supporter, having donated a lot of hardware over the years to Debian, OpenSuSe, Gentoo, Crux and many other Linux distributions.
Genesi are very active in optimizing software specifically for ARM Cortex by porting libraries to the NEON unit in these devices resulting in large speedups.
Genesi has a developer forum: http://www.powerdeveloper.org
Canonical is showing the Freescale i.MX51 Pegatron Laptop reference design running the latest version of Ubuntu Netbook Edition optimized for ARM for speed (could they be calling this the Ubuntu Smartbook Edition?). In this video, the representative of Canonical explains some of the things that are being worked on to optimize Linux as a full laptop experience on ARM platforms like the ARM Cortex A8 and the multi-core ARM Cortex A9 that are coming out soon. I will film another video with Canonical to try to get more details on how the upcoming ARM Powered laptops are going to look like and how Linux is being optimized for it.
This is the tablet version of the Netwalker on sale in Japan. It has a resistive touchscreen and is powered by a Freescale i.MX51 processor.
Ubuntu has been working over these past couple of years with ARM and ARM partners such as Freescale to optimize the Ubuntu OS for ARM Processors. Here’s a demonstration of the latest version of Ubuntu 10.4 running on a Freescale i.MX51 development board. In theory this Ubuntu desktop could be sold for below $100 without the screen, keyboard and mouse.
At about 3x lower power consumption, much lower heat dissipation and much lower overall system pricing, the Freescale i.MX515 platform in a development board developed by Pegatron, is used for benchmarks of all kinds of performance areas by processor benchmarking expert Van Smith at this 9-page benchmarking article at brightsideofnews.com
While this specific ARM Cortex A8 implementation performs great on integers, power consumption, heat dissipation, price, floating-point performance still needs some improvement with ARM Cortex designs to come. Consider also that Ubuntu 9.04 used in this test is only the first implementation of Ubuntu for ARM Cortex and that Ubuntu 10.4 which is imminently going to be released will significantly improve ARM performance of those benchmarks.
The ARM Cortex-A8 sample that we tested in the form of the Freescale i.MX515 lived in an ecosystem that was not competitive with the x86 rivals in this comparison. The video subsystem is very limited. Memory support is a very slow 32-bit, DDR2-200MHz.
I guess it’s not yet possible for Van Smith in this test to make an apples to apples comparison as the current ARM Cortex A8 are still oriented at Smart Phones and thin and light Tablets rather than full SmartBooks for full desktop-like performance requirements of the more desktop-performance oriented next generation ARM Cortex designs.
The goal for ARM when reaching the markets of Laptop and Desktop form factors is to reach the level of performance required to run full high resolution Web Browsers at full speed, where the OS with the browser boots instantly, with fast enough RAM where unlimited tabs open instantly, where hardware acceleration of embedded videos functions smoothly and where even the Native Client and 3D features run fully within the ARM Powered Web Browser. Once that level of performance is reached, further performance improvements will be less important than lowering the power consumption and lowering the cost of the next processors. Once everything most users need to have processed on their devices seem to run instantly, reaching the instant browser performance level, why would anyone want to increase the performance of client device oriented processors further?
You can find the benchmarks at: brightsideofnews.com
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Freescale is showing their reference design for sub-$200 tablets. The target is that tablets can soon be sold below $200 to end consumers that are able to run any Linux-based OS, including Android or Chromium OS – based on the open-source code available at http://chromium.org
In this video, Freescale’s product manager of Software Development demonstrates the status of their optimizations of running Chromium OS on their i.MX51 based devices, among other form factors is the recently announced $199 tablet form factor. It even supports hardware acceleration of HTML5 based video playback.
This means, full power Chromium OS could be made available in the next few months in Laptop and Tablet form factors to be sold well below $200 unlocked without contracts. The main question is how fast and how smooth will the Chromium Browser feel on ARM Powered devices? This is to be seen and tested very soon! Follow my video-blog for hands-on reports showing performance of Chromium OS running on all the ARM Powered devices very soon. Check also for Chrome browser running within Android, or for Chromium OS modified to add Android apps support, thus merging the two.
I also wonder, how much more does a $65 ARM Powered laptop cost if it uses an ARM Cortex A8 processor like the ones from Freescale instead of the ARM9 or ARM11 based ones from rockchip, VIA, Samsung and others. If the price increase is within $35, then welcome will be all the sub-$100 full power smooth ARM Powered Chromium OS laptops and tablets! Without actually knowing the real price difference between the ARM9, ARM11 and ARM Cortex based cheap laptops, my guess is that the availability of sub-$200 and sub-$100 Chromium/Android Laptops/Tablets is a possibility.
How soon will we see Google sell unlocked Chromium/Android on ARM powered laptop/tablet/e-reader convertibles with 50-hour battery life on Pixel Qi screens at http://google.com/laptop?
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DSK Digital is launching this Texas Instruments OMAP3 600mhz ARM based full Linux computer system for a whole bunch of low power, even solar powered computing for on the field healthcare, e-government and teacher training applications.
Marvell is showing an awesome looking full Ubuntu 9.10 desktop solution, based on their Marvell Armada 510 processor and system on chip design, manufacturers can now make desktop computers running Ubuntu to be sold for as little as $100 to $150 depending on volumes and margins taken by retailers. You get HDMI output, e-sata, 3 USB ports, audio in/out, all integrated in one ultra slim and light desktop box. It can playback 1080p video, output 1080p Ubuntu user interfaces and also render 3D games like Quake3 at the same time. This ebox Ubuntu desktop example is manufactured by Quanta.
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This video about the cheap Chromium OS Tablet revolution was a bit too good (smooth Chromium on ARM Powered device!!), so I have been asked to remove it for now and edit some parts out and upload a new video.
I hope to get an edited version of it back online at some point. Or perhaps they will agree to let me film new video about it soon.
This page got some coverage at:
http://slashdot.org/story/10/01/10/1649202/199-Freescale-Tablet-Design-Runs-Chromium-OS
http://www.liliputing.com/2010/01/freescale-tablet-running-chromium-os-video.html
Please, while waiting for the video to come back online, do check a selection of my other cool CES coverage videos:
Marvell Armada 610 powers Android Tablet reference design
Quanta ARM Powered Android laptop
First Look at the iRex 800SG e-ink e-reader
Freescale powered e-ink e-readers
MSI Tegra2 10.1″ Android Tablet
Charbax tests Pixel Qi at CES 2010
Notion Ink Pixel Qi tablet with Nvidia Tegra2 processor
Nvidia Tegra2 ARM Cortex A9 at CES 2010
Chumby powers the Sony Dash (interview with Chumby)
Please also do check out all those other videos and blog about those if you like them thanks.
Subscribe to my RSS feed thanks, I still have 15-20 CES videos that I am trying to upload (Luxor Las Vegas Hotel Ethernet upload speed is slow and capped at 512kbit/s)
Steve Sperle, head of Consumer Segment Marketing at Freescale, shows us an overview of the product demonstrated at their Suite several new tablet, e-reader, laptops, smartbooks and interactive display implementations of their i.MX515 ARM based processor technology.
Freescale is powering a new Smartbook design by Wistron running Canonical’s Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Sharp runs a Freescale processor in the Sharp PC-Z1 and Acer is launching the DisplayPlus D241H 24-inch smart monitor.
Here is Marvell Armada 510 1.2GHz powered laptop that is capable of 1080p video playback. I will film it more in detail showing the status of the Ubuntu Linux implementation, show the performance of the web browser and more features of this laptop during the next few days.
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Basically, he is saying that Asus prefers to use Windows only for now.
This super compact desktop consumes under 1W of power and still runs all the important software that most people need.
Qualcomm Manager of Business Development at Qualcomm for Computing and Consumer Products, Mike Yin, is showing an impressive bunch of what they now call Smartbooks, ARM Cortex A8 based hardware accelerated netbooks runing full Android OS, Xandros ARM or some other Linux OS, launching and navigating in full web browsers, playing back full quality and bitrate videos.
