ARM is now 26 years old, this is my interview with Chris Turner, he was the first employee at Acorn Computers, who created the Acorn Archimedes, the BBC Micro and worked together with inventor and designer of the first ARM Processor Sophie Wilson who I interviewed here 1of3, 2of3, 3of3 and Steve Furber who I interviewed here and the co-founder CEO of Acorn Hermann Hauser who I interviewed here.
Category: Favorite companies
Chris Turner, Acorn first employee, ARM Marketing Director, CPU Group and Advanced Technologies
Posted by – April 11, 2017
Linaro CEO George Grey at Linaro Connect Budapest 2017
Posted by – April 11, 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.
World’s best device: Samsung Chromebook Plus review after 1 month use
My impressions on the coolest ARM Powered Laptop yet, the Samsung Chromebook Plus ($419 top selling 2-in-1 on Amazon.com) that features a Rockchip OP1 dual ARM Cortex-A72 with quad ARM Cortex-A53, ARM Mali-T860MP4 GPU. The performance is great on this device, with the firmware updates from Google also speeding things up regularly, this device is amazingly cool and aweome. But in this video I mention a few things I am hoping Google can improve in the software, mostly to do with improving the Android apps for productivity, I’d like a 4K video editor that works and that is hardware accelerated, I think that Google needs to help PowerDirector and Kinemaster get hardware acceleration and 4K video editing support on this device. Even better perhaps would be if Google could contact the Lumafusion developers and support them to port their 4K60 video editor to Android and optimized for the OP1 processor. Other missing apps in the Google Play store are Microsoft Office, Popcorn time, I don’t want to be setting my Chromebook in Developer mode just to sideload apps that may not even be optimized for the Chromebook yet. Photo editors such as GIMP on Android, Adobe Photoshop need to get supported. Few more other productivity apps for developers, creatives, professionals and students I think need to get ported to this Chromebook Android device. Then Google also needs to improve the features of the stylus touch pen on this device, I’d like the stylus shortcuts and gestures allow to do productive work and study such as annotation collaboration, screen region selector saves to JPG to use as thumbnails in YouTube. In terms of the hardware, I am only hoping to be able to prove that USB Type-C SD card adapter to a USB3 Hard drive file transfers are fully fast enough (as fast as on any Intel Windows machine, hopefully), and also I hope to be able to prove that Wi-Fi performance is just as fast and reliable as with any other laptop. Except the missing backlight on the keyboard and the slightly smaller keyboard than full size, otherwise I think this laptop hardware is pretty much near perfect. It is now my main laptop, I just wish that I could do 4K60 video editing in a good Android video editing app, that the Android and the Chrome OS part get better integrated, for example when I save files in Android apps I want to be able to easily get access and upload these files from the Chrome OS Chrome Browser. I’ll be posting more videos about my Samsung Chromebook Plus in the weeks and months ahead as I expect that it will get better with Google’s full support. Samsung really needs to soon start selling it in Europe!
Amit Kucheria, 96Boards Technical Lead about 96Boards evolution, IoT, mezzanine and future spec
Posted by – March 28, 2017
Amit Kucheria, 96Boards Technical Lead, Yang Zhang, 96Boards Director and Robert Wolff, 96Boards Community Manager host of the http://96boards.org/openhours talk about the 96Boards adoption process for chip makers and manufacturers. Amit and Robert dive deeper into the 96Boards evolution and specification, compliance and testing, and the OpenHours program. Highlighting many announcements from the previous day’s keynote, taking a look at a table full of 96Boards from Consumer edition to IoT edition and a bunch of community driven Mezzanine products. The 96Boards team takes a look at the different 96Boards footprints and talks about the future.
Jon Maddog Hall and Robert Wolff after the Linaro Opening Keynote
Posted by – March 28, 2017
Category: Exclusive videos, Linaro Connect
Robert Wolff and Jon “maddog” Hall talk about the opening keynote from Linaro Connect in Budapest #BUD17. Check out maddog’s reaction to the on stage IoT demo, which used not only Cabon and Nitrogen IoT boards, but also the new Sensor Hub board. Robert and maddog also touched on the various 96Boards announcements around newly available Consumer, IoT and Enterprise edition boards such as the Orange Pi, Oxalis and the MediaTek X20 Professional development board and how it all fits in the 96Boards ecosystem.
96Boards MediaTek X20 Pro development board by ArcherMind
Posted by – March 25, 2017
ArcherMind presents the MediaTek X20 Pro 96Boards development board featuring the MediaTek X20 10-core heterogeneous processor, Tri-Cluster dual ARM Cortex-A72, octa ARM Cortex-A53 with Mali-T880 GPU and MediaTek’s multimedia support. The MediaTek X20 Pro development board also features 3G/4G LTE support, 2k LCM or two 1080P LCM,13M+13M dual camera you can read more about it here. This video also features ArcherMind’s Mstar Altra enterprise edition 96Boards based on Mstar MSD6A838 quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 featuring Mstar 4K M-Genuine Video Engine which supports MEMC, HDR, De-noise, color enhance and etc.
Yang Zhang, Director of 96Boards and Robert Wolff, Host of 96Boards Open Hours
Posted by – March 25, 2017
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.
SCEWO stairclimbing wheelchair from ETH Zurich using Toradex at Embedded World 2017
Posted by – March 23, 2017
SCEWO is a stairclimbing wheelchair equipped with a Toradex Apalis iMX6 SoM – born from a master’s degree thesis from Zurich University (ETH), which demonstrates what can be done using Toradex Computer on Modules (CoMs)/System on Modules(SoMs) in safety-critical applications. Other engaging demos included TAQ, the balancing robot, featuring Toradex’s Colibri iMX7 SoM with NXP i.MX 7 processor, a rover using the Apalis TK1 SoM with the NVIDIA TK1 to recognize street signs, and many more at Toradex’s booth at Embedded World 2017. Toradex also mentioned its launch of two new SoMs based on NXP i.MX 8QuadMax and NXP i.MX 6ULL: Apalis iMX8 and Colibri iMX6ULL respectively. The Colibri iMX6ULL offers a low-cost and power efficient platform, along with integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, targeting the emerging IoT and connected market; and the Apalis iMX8 offers high-performance and powerful graphics for Computer Vision applications.
Project developers and industry insiders can contact Toradex here:
lakshmi.naidu@toradex.com
https://www.toradex.com
David Rusling, Linaro CTO, status and roadmap of Linaro
Posted by – March 20, 2017
Category: Exclusive videos, Linaro Connect
David Rusling talks about the latest things that are happening and going to happen at Linaro at Linaro Connect Budapest 2017. You can watch my interview with him from nearly 5 years ago here.
Qualcomm Dragonboard 410c at Linaro Connect Budapest 2017
Posted by – March 17, 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.
Socionext SC2A11 ARM Server SoC is 24-core ARM Cortex-A53
Posted by – March 14, 2017
Socionext shows their new SC2A11 ARMv8 server SoC featuring 24 ARM Cortex-A53 cores and their SC2A20 Interconnect bridge. SC2A11 is a highly integrated low-power server system suitable for edge computing which processes data at the edge of the cloud in the IoT era. Large amount of data can be processed faster in memory by adopting the 64bit ARMv8 architecture. Up to 1536 cores can be configured in a system for uses such as web serving, indexing, cloud computing.
Linaro OP-TEE open-source security for the mass-market
Posted by – March 14, 2017
Category: Exclusive videos, Linaro Connect
Joakim Bech talks about Linaro’s work in OP-TEE (Open Portable Trusted Execution Environment) small OS-like environment that sits aside a rich operating system, for instance Android. The purpose of the TEE is to keep all secret credentials and data manipulation in the small TEE rather than in a larger rich OS that is often the vulnerable target of malware and hackers in general. In order to reach this goal, application software is architected in a way such that sensitive functions are precisely defined and offloaded to the TEE in the form of Trusted Applications.
Apache Ambari on ARM server
Posted by – March 14, 2017
At Linaro Connect Budapest 2017, ARM and the Linaro LEG (Linaro Enterprise Group) team demonstrate Apache Ambari running on ARM servers. Apache Ambari is one of key Big Data components that provides an easy to use web interface to provision, manage and monitor Hadoop cluster and various other Big Data tools. In this demo Apache Ambari is running on 3 node cluster with Hadoop, YARN and Zookeeper, all on AARCH64 hardware.
With ARM servers getting into Datacenter, Linaro has been collaborating with ARM and ARM vendors in making sure Big data components work well in AARCH64 architecture. Porting and Building Apache Ambari on AARCH64 is one of the efforts the team has been working on apart from porting, building and benchmarking Hadoop, Spark, Hive, HBase and other Big data components. The team chose to showcase Apache Ambari as a high level component due to it being very intuitive, easy-to-use Hadoop management web UI backed by its RESTful APIs. Ambari provides a dashboard with metrics for CPU, Storage, memory utilization and also metrics for HDFS, MapReduce, Pig, Hive etc for monitoring Hadoop Cluster. It also provides step-by-step wizard for managing Hadoop Clusters (like adding nodes, taking down nodes, doing rolling upgrades, etc).
As of today, Ambari is officially supported only on X86 servers. The work team has done is to patch Ambari to work on AARCH64, which involved patching various dependencies like phantomjs, leveldb, leveldbjni java libaries, etc. Linaro is also part of ODPi organization (odpi.org), which has been working on standardizing Big Data. Ambari is part of ODPi’s operations specs. The collaboration helps in speeding up upstreaming process since ODPi also has some of same maintainers as of ASF.
The work done for this demo is a PoC running in ARM lab (working on Linaro Dev Cloud at the mean time) and yet published.
This video features Eugene Xie ARM Principal Software Engineer & Tech lead of Workloads team of Enterprise Software, BSG, Ganesh Raju – Tech Lead, BigData team and Naresh Bhat, Cavium assignee to Linaro for BigData.
ARM Cordio-N NB-IoT as ARM shipped 100 Billion chips
Posted by – March 14, 2017
ARM announces that 100 Billion ARM Processors have shipped. And in this video, ARM talks about their acquisition of Swedish Mistbase and British NextG-Com to enable ARM’s new Cordio-N NB-IoT narrowband IoT communications standard.
Arrow Dragonboard 820c Extended 96Boards, the Enterprise Edition Oxalis NXP ARMv8 Layerscape LS1012A
Posted by – March 14, 2017
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
Posted by – March 14, 2017
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 shows Video Playback Verification with Robot framework and OpenCV
Posted by – March 14, 2017
The Linaro Digital Home Group (LHG) recognizes the need for automated video testing software in Linaro’s automated validation architecture (LAVA). In LHG they have started looking at the open source Robot Framework generic test automation framework and OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision). The demo at Connect (BUD17) shows some of the first steps of how to automate the verification of video playback using open source test projects that can be implemented as part of the Linaro Continuous Integration (CI) framework.
Linaro RDK with GStreamer-V4L2 video accelerator and Freedreno graphics overlay
Posted by – March 14, 2017
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.
