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.
Category: Qualcomm
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.
Qualcomm ARM Server Centriq 2400 at Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017
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.
LG V30 with Plastic OLED
Here’s my view on the LG V30, a quite nice looking phone with Bang and Olufsen high quality DAC audio, FullVision Plastic OLED nearly bezel-less LG Display (see my LG Display video filmed at SID Display Week 2017 featuring LG’s Plastic OLED display here), it has a nice fingerprint reader on the back (unlike iPhone X). The price is possibly going to be very high (depending on LG’s pricing strategy), something like $699 or $799 maybe.
Sony Xperia XZ1, Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact
Sony has launched the same functionality as in the 5.5 Sony Xperia XZ Premium (which I filmed here) but in a more compact 5.2″ form factor in the Sony Xperia XZ1 and in a 4.6″ form factor in the Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact. One new feature is the 3D Creator which uses Sony’s stacked image sensor to create a 3D scan of any object or person in front of the camera. The Sony Xperia XZ1 has a 19 MP Motion Eye camera with Super slow motion, 5.2” Full-HD HDR display, IP65/68 water resistant2 design and runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 Mobile Platform.
TechNexion Factory Tour
TechNexion is a design and manufacturing company showing in this video its engineering team, that designs IoT smart devices, development boards for the needs of projects like the ARM powered Android Things ecosystem by Google or Amazon Alexa Voice-Recognition development platform and its advanced manufacturing capabilities. In the video, we get a direct glimpse of how ARM modules and systems are designed and how much automation is being utilized in a smart SMT factory. The video tour takes you through all production stages from the module design to SMT manufacturing to post production functional testing. The factory churns out up to 250K PCBA per month. Filmed on location at the TechNexion factory in Taipei, Taiwan in June 2017.
Google Keynote at SID Display Week 2017, Clay Bavor, VP of Google VR/AR
Google is Enabling rich and immersive experiences in virtual and augmented reality, presented by Clay Bavor (at Google since 2005), Google Vice President of Virtual Reality where Google works to create an efficient and scalable software platform for rich VR and AR services to be powered by high performance, power-efficient ARM CPUs, GPUs, sensors, and where Google is also working with the Display insutry to bring amazing new ultra high resolution VR and AR displays to the market. As you can see in this video of the keynote, at the SID Display Week, Google announced they are working with Sharp to create ultra-high resolution LCD displays for VR optimized for very low lag time. Google also works to create 20megapixel per eye prototype VR and AR displays, amounting to 2.5x 4K resolution per eye. And Google is working with ARM and other companies to bring foveated rendering technology to not require the 100-150Gbit/s bandwith for VR and AR content once the microdisplays have such high resolution, this method involves using a camera to track where the eye is focusing and render a very high resolution of exactly what you’re looking at while keeping the resolution and detail lower for where you are not looking at directly, and doing all that accurately with minimal lag time.
Synology NAS at Computex 2017
Synology shows their newest NAS, networking, security and backup products at Computex 2017:
– Diskstation DS418j is a 4 bay network attached storage solution featuring a 1,4ghz realtek 64 bit Dual Core ARM A53 Processor, 1gb of ram, gigabit ethernet, support for 40tb of storage and 16 ip cameras.
– Diskstation DS1817 is an 8 bay network storage solution featuring a Annapurna Al-314 Quad Core 1.7ghz processor, 4 or 8gb of ram, and dual 10 gigabit ethernet ports. There is an expansion unit for an additional 10 drives.
– Diskstation DS718+ is a dual bay network attached storage with gigabit ethernet and a Intel Celeron processor.
– Diskstation DS918+ is a nine bay network attached storage with gigabit ethernet, dual M.2 drives for ssd cache, and an Intel Celeron processor.
– Diskstation DS3018xs is an 6 bay network attached storage solution with a quad core Intel Pentium processor, dual M.2 sdd cache, gigabit ethernet, and 8gb – 32gb of ECC memory.
– Flashstation FS1018 is 12 2.5″ bay all-flash NAS solution, with expansion up to 36 drives. The FS1018 features a Dual Core Pentium, gigabit and 10 gigabit ethernet, and ECC memory ranging from 8 – 32gb.
– Network Video Recorder NVR1218 can support point of sale systems as well as up to 12 cameras and records surveillance footage on up to 7 drives.
– Visualstation V960HD is a Surveillance Station with Live View Companion of 96-Channel 720p HD up to 960FPS.
Security Gateway SG1000 is a security gateway for small companies, which is similar to router. The SG1000 features four RJ45 sockets, SD card slot and a USB port for memory extensions.
Synology also had routers which are capable of controlling and waking up their network attached storage solutions.
– Synology provides a lot of software for controlling their NAS solutions and security gateways over their network as well as backing up and recovering data.
– Synology NAS solutions can run Windows Virtual Machines on Intel based NAS devices.
– Synology Mailplus is a private email solution for enterprise to control their email.
You can read more about these and other NAS solutions at http://www.NASCompares.com and watch the videos at http://youtube.com/SPANdotCOM
Microsoft Keynote: Windows 10 on Qualcomm Snapdragon 835
Here’s the part of the Microsoft keynote at Computex 2017 where they talk about Windows 10 support on Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, announcing that HP, Lenovo and Asus are going to build thin and light ARM Powered Windows 10 devices with built-in e-SIM LTE support.
