Category: Chip provider

Cavium ThunderX2 production systems now available

Posted by Charbax – November 18, 2017
Category: Servers, Exclusive videos, Cavium, Supercomputing

Cavium announces ThunderX2 ARM Server systems now available for customers in server and high performance Supercomputing, partners include Bull/Atos, Cray, Gigabyte, Penguin, Ingrasys/Foxconn and HPE. After 7 years of work by partners in the ARM Server ecosystem (and 7 years of my ARM Server video-blogging), now is finally the time high performance ARM Server systems are launched for cloud computing, high performance computing markets worldwide. The Cavium ThunderX2 server SoC integrates fully out-of-order, high-performance custom cores supporting single and dual-socket configurations. ThunderX2 is optimized to drive high computational performance delivering outstanding memory bandwidth and memory capacity. The new line of ThunderX2 processors includes multiple SKUs for both scale up and scale out applications and is fully compliant with Armv8-A architecture specifications as well as the Arm Server Base System Architecture and Arm Server Base Boot Requirements standards.

ThunderX2 SoC family is supported by a comprehensive software ecosystem ranging from platform level systems management and firmware to commercial Operating Systems, Development Environments and Applications. Cavium has actively engaged in server industry standards groups such as UEFI and delivered numerous reference platforms to a broad array of community and corporate partners. Cavium has also demonstrated its leadership role in the Open Source software community driving upstream kernel enablement and toolchain optimization, actively contributing to Linaro’s Enterprise and Networking Groups, investing in key Linux Foundation projects such as DPDK, OpenHPC, OPNFV and Xen and sponsoring the FreeBSD Foundation’s Armv8 server implementation.

Filmed in 4K60 at Supercomputing 2017 in Denver using Panasonic GH5 ($1999 at Amazon.com) on firmware 2.1 (aperture priority, AF continuous tracking) with Leica 12mm f1.4 ($1297 at Amazon.com) with Sennheiser MKE440 stereo shotgun microphone ($325 at Amazon.com), get $25 off renting cameras and lenses with my referral link at https://share.lensrentals.com/x/wWbHqV

HPE unveils The Machine, Apollo 70, Cavium ThunderX2 ARM HPC Supercomputing platforms

Posted by Charbax – November 17, 2017
Category: Servers, Exclusive videos, Cavium, Supercomputing

HP Enterprise unveils their HPC optimized Cavium ThunderX2 ARM Powered High Performance Computing platforms, the Apollo 70 is a disruptive ARM HPC processor technology with maximum memory bandwidth, familiar management and performance tools, and the density and scalability required for large HPC cluster deployments. And then HPE Labs unveils The Machine which is also powered by a Cavium ThuderX2, it is HPE’s vision for the future of computing as by 2020, one hundred billion connected devices will generate far more demand for computing than today’s infrastructure can accommodate.

The Machine is a custom-built device made for the era of big data. HPE says it has created the world’s largest single-memory computer. The R&D program is the largest in the history of HPE, the former enterprise division of HP that split apart from the consumer-focused division. If the project works, it could be transformative for society. But it is no small effort, as it could require a whole new kind of software. HPE’s prototype can accomodate up to 160 terabytes of memory, capable of simultaneously working with the data held in every book in the Library of Congress five times over — or approximately 160 million books. According to HPE, it has never been possible to hold and manipulate whole data sets of this size in a single-memory system, and this is just a glimpse of the immense potential of Memory-Driven Computing. Following the GenZ Consortium’s vision, based on the current prototype, HPE expects the architecture can scale to an exabyte-scale single-memory system and, beyond that, to a nearly limitless pool of memory — 4,096 yottabytes. For context, that is 250,000 times the entire digital universe today. With that amount of memory, HPE said it will be possible to simultaneously work with every digital health record of every person on earth, every piece of data from Facebook, every trip of Google’s autonomous vehicles, and every data set from space exploration all at the same time — getting to answers and uncovering new opportunities at unprecedented speeds.

Filmed in 4K60 at Supercomputing 2017 in Denver using Panasonic GH5 ($1999 at Amazon.com) on firmware 2.1 (aperture priority, AF continuous tracking) with Leica 12mm f1.4 ($1297 at Amazon.com) with Sennheiser MKE440 stereo shotgun microphone ($325 at Amazon.com), get $25 off renting cameras and lenses with my referral link at https://share.lensrentals.com/x/wWbHqV

Cerevo VR Shoes, Robot Projector, Robot Lamp, IoT

Posted by juliusaugustus – November 7, 2017
Category: Projectors, VR, Robots, Internet of Things, Texas Instruments, CeBIT

Cerevo is a company that was founded in 2008 that specializes in niche IOT products. Cerevo adds shoes to the virtual reality experience. The Shoes enable easier movement with VR applications.  The shoes also enable a more tactile experience and can send sensations to your feet. The VR shoes should range from $800-$1200. The Cerevo Tipron projector is a Robot with a built in projector that moves around on wheals. The Projector robot costs $2299 and offers a display size of up to 80″ with 1280×720 resolution. The lumigent is a robotic voice activated desk lamp. Lumigent technology is integrated into other devices such as cameras, bicycles and other IOT applications.

Arrow shows Dragonboard 410c Development Board

Posted by juliusaugustus – November 7, 2017
Category: Development Boards, Qualcomm, Embedded World, Android, Ubuntu, Windows

Arrow shows the Dragonboard 410c, a Qualcomm Snapdragon based development platform for IOT and industrial platforms. The 410c is based upon a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410E (Quad Core Cortex A53 and Qualcomm Adreno 306), has 1gb of ram and 8gb flash storage plus sd expansion. The 410c supports Android 5.1 (Lollipop) on Linux Kernel 3.10, Linux based on Debian 8.0,Open Embedded, Ubuntu Core, and Windows 10 IoT Core. The 410c in terms of connectivity has a ; One 40-pin low speed expansion connector: UART, SPI, I2S, I2C x2, GPIO x12, DC power; HDMI Full-size Type A connector, one micro USB (device mode only), two USB 2.0 (host mode only), micro SD card slot; 60-pin high speed expansion connector: 4L MIPI-DSI, USB, I2C x2, 2L+4L MIPI-CSI and Footprint for one optional 16-pin analog expansion connector for stereo headset/line-out, speaker and analog line-in.

Daqri Smart Helmet with Augmented Reality

Posted by juliusaugustus – November 7, 2017
Category: VR, Smart Glass, Intel, MWC, Ubuntu

Daqri is a company which produces information technology for industrial uses. The Daqri Smart Helmet is a VR/AR helmet for industrial applications that uses 360-degree navigation cameras to analyze environments. Augmented reality can provide detailed information about work that is going on at a glance. The Smart helmet runs Ubuntu Linux and is based upon an Intel Core M7 processor, Intel realsense cameras, and offers 720p projection for each eye.

ARM Innovation Ecosystem Accelerator (ARM Accelerator)

Posted by Charbax – October 12, 2017
Category: VR, Robots, Internet of Things, Cars, Exclusive videos, Nordic Semiconductor, China Sourcing Fair, ARM

ARM Innovation Ecosystem Accelerator (“ARM Accelerator”) is an international global startup accelerator recruitment network in Mainland China, UK, U.S, Israel, Canada, France, Hong Kong, and Taiwan area, helping startups accelerate development in areas such as VR/AR, Robotics/AI, Smart Car, Smart Healthcare, Smart Home, Smart City. ARM Accelerator is an innovation and acceleration platform featured among ARM’s ecosystem. ARM Accelerator focuses on smart hardware and IoT ecosystem. The core advantage of ARM Accelerator is to create an one-stop platform for China and overseas startups and integrates the world-leading IC design companies and scarce, high-value labs to provide the customers all kinds of incubation and acceleration services, such as professional technology consulting, design service, and global promotion and investment matchmaking.

Nvidia DRIVE PX Pegasus board for self-driving cars has 2 Octa-core ARM SoCs with 512-core CUDA GPU and 2 discreet GPUs for a total of 320 Billion calculations per second

Posted by Charbax – October 11, 2017
Category: Cars, Nvidia

Nvidia DRIVE PX Pegasus board is launched for self-driving cars which includes two ARM SoCs each feature Octa-core Nvidia Xavier Custom ARM processors with Volta 512-core CUDA GPU which supports up to 8K video encode and decode, 7Billion transistors each ARM SoC built on TSMC 16nm FinFET+ with also two next-generation discrete GPUs separately on the board with hardware created for accelerating deep learning and computer vision algorithms, the 4 chips on the board can compute 320 Billion calculations per second with an overall 1TB per second memory bandwidth.

Read more:
http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/nvidia-announces-worlds-first-ai-computer-to-make-robotaxis-a-reality-nasdaq-nvda-2236493.htm
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/self-driving-cars/drive-px/
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/10/nvidias-drive-px-pegasus-is-its-newest-self-driving-supercomputer/
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/10/16449416/nvidia-pegasus-self-driving-car-ai-robotaxi
https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/10/nvidia-introduces-a-computer-for-level-5-autonomous-cars/

Jon Masters, Red Hat Chief ARM Architect at Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017

Posted by Charbax – October 10, 2017
Category: Servers, Exclusive videos, Cavium, Qualcomm, Linaro Connect

Jon Masters says Moores Law may have come to an end and that single threaded performance is not defining the industry anymore because it’s not increasing at the same rate that it used to. What is defining the future of the industry is machine learning, accelerators, lots of additional workload optimization that is happening outside of the core. Thus he believes ARM has an opportunity to get into the mainstream server space in the next 12-18 months with the newest powerful ARM Server solutions such as the Cavium ThunderX2 and the Qualcomm Centriq 2400. You can see some of my previous Jon Masters interviews over the past 5 years here.

Paul McKenney of IBM talks RCU, Quantum Computing at Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017

Posted by Charbax – October 10, 2017
Category: Exclusive videos, IBM, Linaro Connect

I previously interviewed Paul McKenney at Linaro Connect 5 years ago in Hong Kong here, since then he has been working with a lot of things at IBM and this is the first time he’s back at Linaro Connect since that initial interview. He says there might be 20 Billion Linux machines in the world, most of them running on ARM, all of them have Paul McKenney’s Read-Copy Update (RCU) code in them.

Read-copy update (RCU) is a synchronization mechanism that was added to the Linux kernel in October of 2002. RCU achieves scalability improvements by allowing reads to occur concurrently with updates. In contrast with conventional locking primitives that ensure mutual exclusion among concurrent threads regardless of whether they be readers or updaters, or with reader-writer locks that allow concurrent reads but not in the presence of updates, RCU supports concurrency between a single updater and multiple readers. RCU ensures that reads are coherent by maintaining multiple versions of objects and ensuring that they are not freed up until all pre-existing read-side critical sections complete. RCU defines and uses efficient and scalable mechanisms for publishing and reading new versions of an object, and also for deferring the collection of old versions. These mechanisms distribute the work among read and update paths in such a way as to make read paths extremely fast. In some cases (non-preemptable kernels), RCU’s read-side primitives have zero overhead.

Open Source Foundries IoT Zephyr, Linux, IoT Gateways, Bluetooth Mesh microPlatforms demo

Posted by Charbax – October 10, 2017
Category: Internet of Things, Development Boards, Sensors, Exclusive videos, Nordic Semiconductor, Linaro Connect, Foundries.io

Open Source Foundries is a spin off company off of Linaro, composed of a talented group of engineers to work more directly with companies, OEMs, ODMs, small, medium to large companies to bring new open source products and solutions more rapidly to the market. Leveraging all the work done by Linaro and speeding up the time to market, enable rapid product development, here demonstrating some of the open source IoT solutions provided based on Zephyr on ARM Cortex-M and Linux on ARM Cortex-A using the Linaro Technologies Division (LTD) microPlatforms system.

The lack of a secure IoT solution has the industry scrambling. The Open Source Foundries team believes that a world can exist in which all connected devices can be secured and updated in a timely fashion. In this demonstration shown at the Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017, the team showcases its secure end to end FOTA (firmware over the air) solution implementing the latest in connected technologies.

At Open Source Foundries, software is their passion, hacking hardware is their favorite past time, so they have created the OSLight project to convert off the shelf hardware into secure connected devices. They have inserted a Red Bear NRF52 BLE Nano 2 into these lamps, to allow them to communicate over BLE with various cloud services. In the first demo, they demonstrate creating a secure BLE mesh network with these lamps. They show the ability to securely pass messages through the mesh network to control the state of the LED lamp. The next demo shows a set of 96Boards Nitrogens sending temperature data to the SoftBank IoT Cloud with the ONEM2M protocol using 6lowpan over BLE. The third and final demo introduces a variant of the OSLight project, a fully 3D printed light bulb. Instead of a simple LED array it has a 12 LED WRGB NeoPixel which is powered by line voltage, stepped down to 5VDC.

For microcontrollers, they offer their Zephyr microplatform, an open source software reference based on Zephyr RTOS and MCUboot. This software stack implements secure boot, unified microkernel, and IP (TCP or UDP) using 6lowpan over BLE. At the protocol level they’ve embraced industry standards such as LWM2M/ONEM2M/HTTPS/MQTT to provide an array of options for their customers, whilst ensuring no vendor lock in. Open Source Foundries subscribers are offered continuous validated software updates throughout the life of their product for a fixed monthly subscription fee.

On the gateway, they offer their Linux microplatform, which is again, an open source reference based on the latest Linux kernel version, and a minimal Yocto based userspace with a container runtime (Docker). By isolated the OS from the containers, each can be updated independently while providing limitless potential for the applications it can run. For updates they again implement standards, and stay vendor neutral to allow their customers to choose the solution that is right for them. Continuous validated updates for the OS and containers are also offered for this platform for a reasonable fixed monthly fee.

Bero shows his ARM Desktop and ARM Laptop

Posted by Charbax – October 3, 2017
Category: Laptops, Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Qualcomm, Marvell, Linaro Connect, Android

Bero (Bernhard Rosenkränzer) from the Linaro Mobile Group set out this week as you can see in my previous video to build and bring up his ARM Desktop based on the Quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 Marvell MACCHIATObin development board with a Radeon or Nvidia GPU. Bero also built his own ARM Laptop based on the Dragonboard 820 running Open Mandriva Linux.

Latest from the Linaro Digital Home Group at Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017

Posted by Charbax – October 3, 2017
Category: Set-top-boxes, 4K UHD, Development Boards, Exclusive videos, HiSilicon, NXP, Linaro Connect, Android

Mark Gregotski, DIrector of the Linaro Digital Home Group, provides an update on the latest work in open source for the Digital Home Group that LHG is working on including the adoption of OP-TEE (Open Portable Trusted Execution Environment) with DRM integrations including PlayReady DRM PK v3.3 on AOSP 8.0 on the HiKey960 development board and Widevine for Linux and for Android AOSP. NXP demonstrates some of their work, NXP has recently joined the Linaro Digital Home Group. The LHG group has worked to integrate V4L2 with gstreamer and ffmpeg to improve media playback on ARM offloading all the computation onto the video codec hardware of the SoC.

Self Balancing Bot and Home Surveillance Kit by Manivannan Sadhasivam, Applications Engineer, Linaro

Posted by Charbax – October 3, 2017
Category: Cameras, Robots, Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Qualcomm, Linaro Connect

Manivannan Sadhasivam is an Applications Engineer at Linaro on the 96Boards team here Demonstrating some of his latest projects created out of 96Boards Consumer Edition such as the Self Balancing Bot capable of balancing itself using the MPU6050 IMU controlled by Dragonboard 410c. You can find that project at github and a Home Surveillance Kit powered by Dragonboard 410c. OpenCV is used to identify the faces, combined with AWS and servo control to create a home surveillance solution. You can find that project at github

$25 Hoperun Uranus 96Boards IoT board with TI CC3220 ARM Cortex-M4

Posted by Charbax – October 3, 2017
Category: Internet of Things, Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Texas Instruments, Linaro Connect

This development board runs the TI CC3220 is for IoT applications featuring an ARM Cortex-M4 with an associated network processor that runs the whole Wi-Fi, TCP/IP and TLS stack so the main chipset doesn’t have to do any of the networking or security freeing up the whole ARM Cortex-M4 for the IoT application use. At Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017 they are showing it running TI RTOS and Zephyr. This board also features the LiPo battery connector. Adding also IPv6 support and TLS suite, an ARM Cortex-M4 with 1MB Flash, 256KB RAM running at 80Mhz. It’s very low power it can run for years off 2 AAA battery cells with the right duty cycle.

v4l2 in ffmpeg for Kodi with Mesa freedreno GPU hardware acceleration on Dragonboard 410c

Posted by Charbax – October 2, 2017
Category: Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Qualcomm, Linaro Connect

Open Source video decoding with V4L2 (Video4Linux2) hardware accelerated video playback in ffmpeg with latest Kodi 18 from master branch. Video4Linux2 support for FFMPEG means fully open source video acceleration can be available for open source distributions on ARM, here shown off decoding video with v4l2m2m (Video4Linux 2 with Memory to Memory) on the Qualcomm DragonBoard 410c, for H264 decode. Other boards with other chipsets that have video decode engines that can support other codecs such as H265, VP9 etc at 4K and etc will then also be able to support that. It means you can upgrade the kernel when you want to what you want, giving you more freedom being less locked to vendor support and if you find a bug you can actually fix it. Filmed at Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017.

Qualcomm Dragonboard 820c with 4K Debian UI

Posted by Charbax – October 2, 2017
Category: 4K UHD, Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Qualcomm, Linaro Connect

This is the Qualcomm Dragonboard 820c running at 4K the Debian user interface, configured in the 96Boards Extended edition with full sized Ethernet port and more.

Qualcomm Dragonboard 600c

Posted by Charbax – October 2, 2017
Category: Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Qualcomm, Linaro Connect

The Qualcomm DragonBoard 600c features the APQ8064 quad-core Qualcomm Krait chipset, with Adreno A320 GPU, it’s in the 96Boards Extended edition form factor with space for Gigabit Ethernet.

96Boards: $99 ROCK960 Rockchip RK3399 development board

Posted by Charbax – September 30, 2017
Category: 4K UHD, Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Rockchip, Linaro Connect

Yang Zhang, Director of http://96boards.org presents the ROCK960 featuring Rockchip RK3399 Dual-core ARM Cortex-A72, Quad-core ARM Cortex-A53, Mali-T860MP4, USB 3.0, HDMI 2.0, USB Type-C with DisplayPort 1.2, 4-lane PCIe 2.1 for high speed communication to FPGA or external GPU is possible. Rock960 will be used by open AI efforts, with ARM Computing Library available for openCL acceleration. ROCK960 supports Android 7.1, Debian Stretch and Yocto officially, other distributions can be supported by the open source community. Rockchip provides multimedia Linux support for ROCK960. The likely price for the board is going to be $99 for 2GB RAM with 16GB emmc and $139 for 4GB RAM with 32GB emmc.

Specs:
* SoC – Rochchip RK3399 hexa-core big.LITTLE processor with two ARM Cortex A72 cores up to 1.8/2.0 GHz, four Cortex A53 cores @1.4GHz and ARM Mali-T860 MP4 GPU with OpenGL ES 1.1 to 3.2 support,
OpenVG1.1, OpenCL 1.2 and DX 11 support
* System Memory – 2 or 4GB RAM
* Storage – 16 or 32GB eMMC flash + micro SD card
* Video Output – 1x HDMI 2.0 up to 4K@60 Hz with CEC and HDCP
* Connectivity – WiFi 802.11ac 2×2 MIMO up to 867 Mbps, and Bluetooth
4.1 LE (AP6356S module) with two on-board antennas, two u.FL antenna
connectors
* USB – 1x USB 2.0 host port, 1x USB 3.0 port, 1x USB 3.0 type C port
with DP 1.2 support

Expansion
* 1x 40 pin low speed expansion connector – UART, SPI, I2C, GPIO, I2S
* 1x 60 pin high speed expansion connector – MIPI DSI, USB, MIPI CSI, HSIC, SDIO
* 1x M.2 key M PCIe connector with support for up to 4-lane PCIe 2.1
(max bandwidth: 2.0 GB)
* Misc – Power & u-boot buttons. 6 LEDS (4x user, 1x Wifi, 1x Bluetooth)
* Power Supply – 8 to 18V DC input (12V typical) as per 96Boards CE
specs; Battery header

Dimensions – 85 x 54 mm (96Boards CE form factor)

The team behind the ROCK960 is Vamrs Limited, a startup based on Shenzhen, China, with eight employees with average more than 10 years electronics and embedded experience. Vamrs is a 96boards contract Manufacturing Partner. (https://www.linaro.org/company/vamrs/)

Distributors and interested parties can contact Vamrs at support@vamrs.com

Qualcomm ARM Server Centriq 2400 at Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017

Posted by Charbax – September 30, 2017
Category: Servers, Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Qualcomm, Linaro Connect, Ubuntu

This is the Qualcomm 48-core (custom Qualcomm Falkor cores) Centriq 2400 ARM Server reference evaluation board. Featuring 48-cores with 12 DIMM slots of DDR4 RAM memory, dual PCI riser boards for fully customizable setup. At Linaro Connect SFO17, the ARM team is demonstrating an ELK big data demo with ElasticSEarch, Logstash and Kibana for graphic visualization running on Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor. The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor is designed for cloud computing running these microservices in containers seamlessly. There is a 2nd demo of Linuxkit with NGINX running in a container. Both demos use Docker containers running on Ubuntu 16.04.

sub-$1000 Socionext 24-core ARM Desktop Developer Box

Posted by Charbax – September 30, 2017
Category: Servers, Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Linaro Connect, Socionext

Daniel Thompson of Linaro talks about the upcoming new ARM Developerbox that was announced at Linaro Connect SFO17. The box is a 24-core ARM Cortex-A53 low-power workstation allowing software development for ARM to be done on ARM. The board is a collaboration between Socionext, Gigabyte and Linaro and is the first 96Boards Enterprise Edition platform to exploit microATX form-factor and feels like a normal PC motherboard, right up to the row of three PCIe slots that are available.