Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 is Qualcomm’s fastest consumer ARM Processor yet (30-40% faster than last year’s Snapdragon 835 using 30% less power), on 10nm FinFET LPP Samsung process, it features 64bit Octa-core quad 2.8 GHz Kryo 385 Gold which are ARM Cortex-A75 custom cores and quad 1.8 GHz Kryo 385 Silver which are ARM Cortex-A55 custom cores, Qualcomm’s fastest ever GPU the Adreno 630 with its Visual Processing Subsystem (including GPU, VPU and DPU) with OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 2.0, Vulkan2, DxNext eXtended Reality (XR), Room-Scale 6DoF with simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), Adreno Foveation, Advanced visual inertial odometry (VIO), HDR10 and Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG), 4K Ultra HD @ 60 FPS, 2x 2400×2400 @ 120 FPS (VR), 10-bit color depth (encoding and decoding). Qualcomm’s AI Platform is on their 3rd Generation Qualcomm Hexagon 685 DSP which supports sophisticated, on-device AI processing, delivering richer camera, voice, XR and gaming experiences as a Neural Processing Engine (NPE) with Caffe, Caffe2 and TensorFlow support. With DisplayPort and USB Type-C support. Qualcomm’s X20 Modem supports 1.2Gbit/s download speed using 5×20 MHz carrier aggregation, up to 256-QAM, up to 4×4 MIMO on three carriers, up to 150mbit/s upload speed using 2×20 MHz carrier aggregation, up to 64-QAM. Multi-gigabit Wi-Fi 802.11ad and integrated 2×2 802.11ac. Qualcomm Secure Processing Unit (SPU) where Biometrics can be used for authentication can be stored in isolation in hardware.
Category: Qualcomm
Sony XZ2 with 4K HDR recording
Sony launches their XZ2 and XZ2 Compact Smartphone (https://www.sonymobile.com/global-en/products/phones/xperia-xz2/) based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 with 4K HDR video recording support. Featuring a 5.7″ Full HD+ (2160×1080) HDR display (5″ on XZ2 Compact), Dynamic Vibration System with powerful stereo speakers, Full HD 960fps slow motion, 19MP Motion Eye camera with memory-stacked image sensor. 4GB RAM, 64GB UFS internal memory.
My Samsung Galaxy S9/S9+ Review at launch unboxed MWC
Samsung releases the same phone again, this year still $900, but now they re-imagined the camera. It was already a great camera last year. But now it’s better for sure. Now the “amazing” S9 camera has a mind blowing dual aperture so that is supposedly good. The 960fps slow motion is grainy and blurry but it’s the same Sony did in their XZ phone last year. Samsung Dex is great but it seems they haven’t developed any productivity apps yet, just loading whatever is there for smartphone and tablet. The poop emoji is also here the highlight the most important revolutionary feature of 2018, as a copy of Apple’s poop highlight from last year. Also it’s great you can buy your next makeup using augmented reality. Welcome to my Samsung review!
Mellanox ConnectX-5 Interconnect showcased on Qualcomm Centriq 2400 Data Center Platform
At SC17, Qualcomm and Mellanox jointly showcase super-fast 100 Gb/s networking card Mellanox ConnectX-5. This Arm-based solution is enabled and ready for the most demanding compute and storage workloads on the Qualcomm Centriq 2400, the world’s first 10nm server processor.
Qualcomm Centriq 2400 Arm Server presentation at the Supercomputing SC17 ARM User Group Meeting
Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor, based on the Qualcomm Falkor CPU, QDT’s own Armv8-based custom CPU core design, delivers leading-edge aggregate performance, the world’s first and only 10nm server processor. The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor delivers a phenomenal performance-per-dollar. With a list price of $1,995, the 48-core Qualcomm Centriq 2460 processor delivers 4X better performance-per-dollar versus Intel’s highest-performance Skylake processor, the Intel Xeon Platinum 8180. With a list price of $1373, the 46-core Qualcomm Centriq 2452 processor offers 3X better performance-per-dollar versus Intel Xeon Gold 6152. And, with a list price of $888, the 40-core Qualcomm Centriq 2434 processor offers 2X better performance-per-dollar versus Intel Xeon Silver 41166. Qualcomm Centriq 2400 delivers 2.5x better performance per watt than competing x86 server processor running the same SPECint_rate2006 benchmark.
$799 Lenovo Miix 630 Tablet convertible Windows 10 with Qualcomm Snapdragon 835
Lenovo releases their Tablet convertible running a full Windows 10 on the 64bit ARMv8 Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor with built-in LTE. Lenovo digital pen with 1024 levels of sensitivity with Windows Ink. 15.6mm thickness, 1.33kg weight, up to 20 hours of local video playback battery life. Comes with a 12.3″ WUXGA+ touchscreen to be priced starting at $799.
HP Envy x2 Tablet convertible Windows 10 with Qualcomm Snapdragon 835
HP Envy x2 is a detachable convertible Tablet PC running a full Windows 10 on the 64bit ARMv8 Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor with built-in always connected LTE and up to 22 hours of battery life. 90min 0% to 90% fast charging. Up to 1,000 hrs of connected stand-by time. Comes with the HP digital pen with Windows Ink for note taking and scribbling.
Best of CES 2018: Asus NovaGo Snapdragon 835 Windows 10 at Qualcomm CES 2018 booth
Asus wins my prize of most important “best of CES 2018” device. This is the most powerful ARM Powered laptop yet. Finally, after years of work by thousands of Microsoft and Qualcomm engineers, true full Windows 10 on ARM is just about to be ready to be launched onto the worldwide market. Powered by the 10nm Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, with over 20 hours of battery life, while it comes on Windows 10 S by default it can quickly be “upgraded” to full Windows 10 Professional for ARM that gives support for the emulation of every x86 (32bit emulation supported only for now, 64bit x86 apps will be emulated once Microsoft updates the Windows software further) Windows 10 .exe application, hopefully we can run advanced video editing apps such as Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas, Pinnacle Studio, advanced music creation applications such as Ableton Live, Propellerhead Studio, advanced photo editing software such as Gimp and Adobe Photoshop. This Asus NovaGo comes with two full sized USB3 Host ports (sadly, no full sized SD card slot), a full sized HDMI output port, fingerprint reader in the corner of the mousepad and a full sized keyboard with a bright glossy 13.3″ 1080p display. At the Qualcomm CES 2018 booth, they are also showing the two other devices (though both Tablet based 2-in-1 devices with flimsy case/stands) that are being released running Windows 10 on Snapdragon 835 which are the HP Envy x2 and the Lenovo Miix 630. I was hoping that somehow this would be the time Lenovo would unveil an ARM Powered Thinkpad style laptop, but hopefully Lenovo will consider to do that soon enough! In my opinion, Lenovo should do a Thinkpad X1 Carbon and Thinkpad x280 style ARM Snapdragon 835 laptop, that would be great, if possible sold at 50 percent cheaper than the Intel version of each. Also if HP would make an ARM Powered version of their HP Spectre x360, that would also be awesome. Of course it would be really great if they would sell this with an unlockable bootloader (they can manage it “securely” through an approval kind of thing if they’d like) and that users could install among many flavors of Linux on it if they’d prefer (Qualcomm should support the community to still keep full GPU acceleration and full LTE support within any Linux). The Asus NovaGo is the only real Laptop form factor yet running this new very important full Windows 10 on ARM platform.
Geniatech Tablet Dock for 96Boards
Geniatech shows their Tablet Dock for use with 96Boards compatible/sized development boards, where the board can just be swapped into the Tablet Dock to power it, including with touch support. To be distributed by Arrow at an affordable price.
Geniatech also provides a range of 96Board sized open source Qualcomm 410, 820 based development boards which you can see some of them featured in this video filmed at Embedded World 2017:
Interview with Matt Grob, Qualcomm EVP, Technology at Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017
Matt Grob is Executive Vice President of technology for Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and a member of Qualcomm’s executive committee. Matt Grob joined Qualcomm in 1991, In 1998, Grob was promoted to lead the Company’s R&D system engineering group and in 2006, he became in charge Qualcomm’s Corporate R&D division, now known as Qualcomm Research. Grob also served as Qualcomm’s Chief Technology Officer from 2011-2017.
You can also watch the video of his Keynote at Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017 here:
Qualcomm Dragonboard 820c runs Debian Radios streaming with VLC, Icecast
Here’s the upcoming Qualcomm Dragonboard 820c shown off doing some multimedia streaming running Debian with VLC, Icecast and a USB Radios dongle. Filmed at the Linaro Connect.
Thundersoft CTO Pengcheng Zou talks Open Source Automotive and more
Thunder Software Technology Co., Ltd. is a smart device operating system and platform technology provider since 2008, providing smart device operating system solutions, speeding-up time to market for smart phone, IoT, automotive, robots, drones, cars, smart logistics, with years of R&D investment in mobile OS technology such as Android, Linux, Windows and HTML5, from the hard drive, operating system kernel, and middleware to upper application, and has accumulated extensive experience along with a large number of IP including protocol stack, deep learning, computer graphics techniques, operating system optimization, security solutions, etc.
Grant Likely’s Open Source Arcade based on 96Boards
Grant Likely has built a custom video-game arcade machine with colorful control buttons and mouse for using with classic arcade game emulators, all Open Source and Open Hardware, with the source code up on GitHub with some links up at http://www.secretlab.ca/archives/240 you can also watch his Arcade assembly time lapse video. Filmed at the Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017.
Jon Masters, Red Hat Chief ARM Architect at Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017
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.
Bero shows his ARM Desktop and ARM Laptop
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.
Self Balancing Bot and Home Surveillance Kit by Manivannan Sadhasivam, Applications Engineer, Linaro
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
v4l2 in ffmpeg for Kodi with Mesa freedreno GPU hardware acceleration on Dragonboard 410c
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
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
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.
