Qualcomm demonstrates a full version of Windows 10 running every x86 application through emulation technology that Microsoft and Qualcomm have worked on very hardly to hopefully be able to show good performance running any x86 Windows app on ARM, as the Snapdragon 835 is the fastest ARM processor in the world, at least the fastest ever from Qualcomm. The marketing angle will also position every ARM Powered Windows 10 Laptop as being with built-in Gigabit LTE through an eSIM meaning you will be able to click and subscribe to any Data plan or with your telco agreeing add your Laptop simply to your existing LTE Smartphone package. Consumers will be able to expect amazingly fast LTE connectivity, very long battery life, always connected always standby functionality (checking emails etc in the background even while the Laptop is closed), compatibility with all x86 Windows apps (win32), it will be interesting to see if apps like GIMP, Adobe Photoshop, Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere and other more demanding x86 Windows .exe apps if they can install and run with decent enough performance through this emulator. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft and Qualcomm are able to utilise all the hardware acceleration such as the GPU and all 8 cores of the Snapdragon 835 big.LITTLE “Built on Cortex Technology” platform to speed up the performance even of advanced apps and games to somehow magically perform well through the emulator. Possibly that Qualcomm even designed a specific area on the Snapdragon 835 SoC that is specifically designed to further accelerate the x86 Windows app emulation functionality? Windows 10 on ARM devices will hopefully start shipping at prices around $600-700 in extremely thin and light form factories to be made by Lenovo, HP and Asus and hopefully released worldwide before the end of the year.
Category: Qualcomm
Fairphone2 with Ubuntu Touch ported by UBPorts
UBports has ported Ubuntu Touch to the Fairphone 2 smartphone. The Fairphone 2 is designed to be ethical, repairable, upgradeable, and controlled by the user. The Fairphone 2 has a Snapdragon 801 processor, 2mp front camera, 8mp back camera, 5″ 1080p display, 32GB of storage, 2gb of ram, MicroSD and Micro-USB.
Allwinner VR9, 6K30p, 4K60p for VR, Allwinner A63, 28nm Quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 with Mali-T760MP2
Allwinner launches their new Allwinner VR9 Octa-core ARM Cortex-A53 with Mali-T760 GPU for higher performance All-in-one VR. 6K VR can render about 6000×3000, thus upcoming VR displays with something around 3000×3000 for each eye. Then Allwinner A63 is Allwinner’s new Quad-core 64bit ARM Cortex-A53 with Mali-T760MP2 GPU with support for 2K displays, on a lower power consuming 28nm process, for longer battery life, to come to the marketing within the next 1-2 months from now. At the Allwinner booth is the Seegene.com Allwinner H8 Octa-core ARM Cortex-A7 powered Augmented Reality headset with dual 1280×800 OLED micro-displays reflected through a prism for sale for about $1000. Allwinner also shows some of their latest tablets, kids tablets, AI speakers with Amazon Alexa API support, baby monitoring tablet and camera, panning camera tablet, A64 Powered Tablets and 2-in-1 with Android 7.0 GMS tested. The Aikun Morphus X300 having features like the Nintendo Switch but having been released a while before Nintendo. POS machines, the new Allwinner Y10 quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 for interactive connected photo frames with gesture control support. All-in-one VR. A64 development board by Occocci, LTE connected solutions with Qualcomm, and solutions for the Smart Assistant Speakers market.
OpenMandriva ARM Powered Laptop at the OpenMandriva Summit in Budapest
At the OpenMandriva meeting in Budapest with Bernhard Rosenkränzer and Colin Close, President of OpenMandriva, showing off the ARM Powered laptop that could run Open Mandriva at the Open Mandriva meeting in Budapest. This video was taken at the OpenMandriva annual meeting which this year took place in the City of Budapest where the OpenMandriva team met to talk about their plans to workw to move their distro forward. One of the major decisions taken was to move fully to the Clang compiler suite by using lld as their default linker. This is in line with their efforts to create a distro that can be used on more modern architectures. The Clang compiler/linker suite brings with it built in cross-compilers which make the creation of packages for alternate processors such as on their prototype laptop using hardware for 64bit ARM architecture using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 Extended 96Boards, they have built sufficient core software to be able to provide a distro for it. Recently a key element required for them to bring this project to fruition was the demonstration of freedreno graphics driver running on the latest Adreno GPU. The OpenMandriva team are looking forward to test this new driver alongside the OpenMandriva software compilation. Another major discussion point was the OpenMandriva package management system. A decision was taken to start using the dnf package manager for the core management function, they will however provide a wrapper script so that users will still be able to use familiar command to perform package management. These changes will have a major impact on their distributed build farm as it will require restructuring the repository metadata on their ABF (Automated Build Farm) while they are doing this they will take the opportunity to incorporate a QA system and a method for building multiple dependent packages within a container. They hope these changes will improve the overall quality of the OpenMandriva distribution. If you would like to to join the OpenMandriva Association either as a user or as a developer you can visit their website http://www.openmandriva.org or contract them through the developer irc channel on freenode #openmandriva-cooker, if you have no packaging experience there are plenty of interesting jobs to do that don’t require coding skills.
Linaro CEO George Grey at Linaro Connect Budapest 2017
Linaro CEO George Grey interview on the last day of the Linaro Connect in Budapest 2017, talking about Google joining Linaro as a club member, some of the latest developments at Linaro, the high amount of contributions from Linaro into Linux and open source, IoT, Servers, Mobile, Networking, Kernel, Gateways, Set-top-boxes, Smart TVs, Android, and a lot more. Other new Linaro members are HXT a joint venture between Qualcomm and the CHinese Government, Fujitsu with their new ARM Powered Supercomupter. You can watch George Grey’s opening keynote at Linaro Connect Budapest 2017 here.
Yang Zhang, Director of 96Boards and Robert Wolff, Host of 96Boards Open Hours
Yang Zhang is the Director of Linaro’s http://96boards.org with Robert Wolff host of http://96boards.org/openhours talk about the status of the 40+ 96Boards that are in development, the 96Boards standard and latest news, IoT boards, extended boards, Enterprise boards and what may happen in the future.
Qualcomm Dragonboard 410c at Linaro Connect Budapest 2017
Following the http://96boards.org/openhours/ session at Linaro Connect Budapest 2017, Lawrence King, Engineer, Sr. Staff/Mgr at Qualcomm Canada, talks a bit about the history of Dragonboard (since my video of an early Dragonboard filmed with him at Computex 2011) leading to the Dragonboard 410c, the ecosystem that is being built around it and some of what’s to come from Qualcomm with Dragonboard.
Arrow Dragonboard 820c Extended 96Boards, the Enterprise Edition Oxalis NXP ARMv8 Layerscape LS1012A
Arrow shows an early prototype of their upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 based extended edition 96Boards and they are showing their first Enterprise Edition 96Board named Oxalis. Based on NXPs latest ARMv8 Layerscape LS1012A Processor running at 800MHz, this board delivers up to date connectivity with two USB-3.0 ports, SATA, 2x Gigabit Ethernet and PCIe.
Arrow also has a whole bunch of other new development boards such as the Meercat, an i.MX7 based ARM Cortex-A7 board with ARM Cortex-M4 and the Chameleon, the first Intel / Altera FPGA based 96Boards. You can read Arrow’s article about maker’s experiences with the 96Boards here.
Also check back in the days to come as I will be filming Arrows presenting their latest 96Boards at the Embedded World in Nürnberg 14th-16th February, you can get your free pass here.
Robert Wolff featured in this video is the comunity manager at 96Boards hosting the weekly 96Boards Open Hours.
Freedreno enables Linux distros on Dragonboard 820c 96Boards
Rob Clark, maker of the open source GPU driver Freedreno shows off his latest Freedreno open source GPU working on an upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 based Dragonboard 820c development board, one that is going to use an expanded 96Boards specification to add PCI-E and Gigabit Ethernet ports among other things to the development board. This Freedreno and 820 board provides a significant jump in performance for the GPU, possibly 4x to 5x between the Adreno 306 in a Dragonboard 410c and the Adreno 530 in a Snapdragon 820 based board. The availability of the Freedreno open source GPU driver on Qualcomm based development boards means that these development boards can run all sorts of Linux distributions, including Debian, not just Android. You can read more about the Dragonboard 820c here.
Linaro RDK with GStreamer-V4L2 video accelerator and Freedreno graphics overlay
The Linaro Digital Home Group (LHG) has extensive experience working with the Comcast RDK. LHG has been instrumental in leading open source initiatives in the RDK. At Linaro Connect (BUD17), the LHG Director, Mark Gregotski, along with 2 Comcast assignee engineers (Siva Patchaiperumal and Kalyan Nagabhirava) are demonstrating a port of the RDK to the Qualcomm 96Boards Dragonboard 410c. This demo shows the RDK media framework taking advantage of the GStreamer-V4L2 support provided by the DBD410C to use the hardware video decoder. The HD video is scaled and then a rotating triangle is overlaid using the open source Freedreno graphics support available with DB410C. The demo shows smooth video playback without any stuttering with smooth graphics overlay. Since the video decode is offloaded to the video hardware, the CPU is not heavily loaded.
Oliver “Ogra” Grawert talks Ubuntu Core on Dragonboard 410c at Linaro Connect Budapest 2017
Robert Wolff of the weekly 96Boards Open Hours show interviews Oliver “Ogra” Grawert of Canonical about the status of Snappy Ubuntu Core on the 96Boards including the Dragonboard 410c and more about Ubuntu Core, Canonical’s strategy in IoT, security and updates through the Build.Snapcraft.io platform. You can watch the 96Boards Open Hours episode featuring Robert Wolff and Ogra here.
Ubuntu Core, Snapcraft.io IoT package support/update, Dragonboard 410c, Raspberry Pi and more
Canonical shows some of the latest development boards where Ubuntu Core is supported, includes the 96Boards Qualcomm Dragonboard 410c, Raspberry Pi 3, Raspberry Pi Nano expecting to ship on a coin sized board. Also shipping on Samsung Artik, NXP i.MX6/i.MX7/i.MX8 and on Intel powered development boards also. Canonical also promotes their http://build.snapcraft.io platform to package any app for every Linux desktop, server, cloud or device, and deliver updates directly.
MotoMods on Indiegogo and Hackathons for the ultimate Moto Z modular Smartphone platform
The Lenovo Moto Z MotoMods ecosystem team got 700 submitions, launching 35 of those campaigns for ideas for new MotoMods on Transform the Smartphone challenge on Indiegogo with ideas ranging from barcode scanners, Edge Light LED lights for notifications wireless charging, sliding physical keyboard and many more ideas for new MotoMods that can be made for the Moto Z ecosystem. Motorola organized a Hackathon in San Francisco and one New York You can also see my video of the Moto Z and its MotoMods here and my 32-minute interview with the Motorola team about the Moto Z and its MotoMods ecosystem here
Nokia Android Phones are finally coming, 139€ Nokia 3 , 229€ Nokia 5, 189€ Nokia 6
Nokia branded Android smartphones are being launched by ex-Nokia employees having formed a new company HMD Global. Nokia Android phones are aimed at providing highest possible specs at budget prices running stock Android 7.0. The Nokia 5 and 6 features a unibody Aluminum design while the Nokia 3 features a polycarbonate design.
The Nokia 6 is the most fully featured device offered featuring a featuring FHD 5.5″, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 processor. The front camera is 8-megapixel and the back camera is 16mp. The Arte Black version of the Nokia 6 features 4gb of ram and 64gb of storage. The Arte Black version will sell for 299 euros. The Standard Nokia 6 will retail 229 euros.
The Nokia 5 has is similar to the Nokia 6 but has a curved edge display. The Nokia 5 has a 5.5″ (720p) display, Snapdragon 430 processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage and microSD. The Nokia 5 will sell for 189 Euros.
The Nokia 3 features a 5″ (720p) display, an MTK 6737 quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, and Microsd support. The Nokia 3 will sell for a price of 139 Euros.
HP Elite x3 with Lapdock with 1D and 2D barcode scanner
HP Elite x3 and Lapdock was my “Best of MWC 2016” as you can see in my video from last year, the HP Elite X3 can be docked into a Lapdock or desktop dock via USB Type C connectivity and be used in Windows Continuum mode offering functionality similar to a full computer. The Lapdock offers a full hd 12.5″ screen and full laptop keyboard.
Oppo shows 5X lossless optical dual camera zoom
Oppo showcases their technology that allows 5X zoom inside a smartphone body. The technique used involves a periscope-style structure that diverts light through a prism and onto a wide-angle lens, that allows for a claimed lossless 5X zoom. It is demonstrated on a prototype Oppo phone using a 6″ QHD with Oppo VOOC fast charging.
Qualcomm X50 modem for 5G New Radio
The next step in cellular technology, 5G, is demonstrated here by Qualcomm. It is in the research phase, and the current application shown involves the broadcasting of RF power to a moving target at a frequency of 28GHz. A major limitation of 5G is the easy dissipation of the signal when faced with even minor obstructions, which Qualcomm aims to overcome by installing multiple towers and handing over users between them.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 with Gigabit LTE
Qualcomm demonstrates their X16 Cat16 Gigabit LTE modem integrated in the upcoming Sony Xperia XZ Premium using Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 which features 4×4 MIMO (multiple input multiple output). The phone uses 4 LTE antennaes instead of the usual 2 to boost throughput speeds to 1Gbps using carrier aggregation. The technology is expected to be more power efficient since the faster downloads would finish quicker, effectively lessening the time cellular data is used.
