Category: OS

Sunchip Type-C Display, RK3128 Arcade Machine, TV Box, Mini PC

Posted by – October 13, 2019

$250 Pipo Snapdragon 850 Laptop, $350 Snapdragon 850 2-in-1 “as MateBook E”

Posted by – October 13, 2019

Pipo is showing the cheapest new Snapdragon 850 based ARM Laptops with a clamshell 13.3″, 14.1″ or 15.4″ version that can start at around $250 for the WiFi-only version requiring a minimum order of 1000 pieces, to about $350 for the 2-in-1 tablet with docking keyboard design that looks like the Huawei MateBook E, that is also for distributors to order at least 1000 pieces in a mass order.

Aikun AP-100W projector, AP-200W

Posted by – October 13, 2019

Amazfit Stratos 3 Smartwatch, Amazfit GTS with AMOLED, Amazfit X concept watch

Posted by – September 28, 2019

Huami Technology unveils the Amazfit Smart Sports Watch 3 (Amazfit Stratos 3), focusing on professional sports function, with improvements over Amazfit Smart Sports Watch 2S, featuring a 1.34″ Full Moon Display full circular reflector screen made by JDI, ideal for outdoor use, NFC, surrounded by 3.6L stainless steel with four physical buttons around the dial to allowing the user to operate as well as the touch screen too. With multiple sensors, using two master chips and two operating systems in smart mode and long-range Ultra mode on the Amazfit Smart Sports Watch 3 (Amazfit Stratos 3) can provide 7 to 14 days of battery. With 19 different motion modes, to accurately measure with the built-in BioTracker heart rate sensor, low-power Sony GNSS chip supports four positioning systems: GPS, GLONASS, Beidou and Galileo, continuous GPS positioning can reach 70 hours on the battery, enough for most professional outdoor sports usage.

Amazfit GTS 1.65 inch AMOLED with 341ppi pixel density with 100% NTSC gamut, ultra-high color saturation, real and vivid display, combined with transparent 2.5D arc glass, 9.4mm screen thickness, thinner than Apple Watch, over-the-horizon screen, available in six colors to choose from, supports 12 motion modes and GPS+GLONASSS binary positioning. 50 meters deep waterproof performance.

$999 Samsung Galaxy Book S on Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx

Posted by – September 28, 2019

Samsung use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx ARM processor on 7nm system-on-a-chip (40% faster CPU, 80% faster GPU compared to Galaxy Book 2), runs Windows 10, with 23 hours of battery, gigabit LTE, always on, always connected, touch-to-wake, instant-on feature, 0.96kg weight, 13.3″ 1080p, multi-touch display (10 points), 1TB SSD, AKG stereo sound with Dolby Atmos support, 8GB LPDDR4X RAM, MicroSD slot, 720p front-facing camera, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 5.0, USB-C port, and Windows Hello sign-in via a fingerprint sensor. The laptop’s dimensions are 305.2×203.2×6.2-11.8 mm.

BOE 12.3″ Rollable Phone, 7.7″ Foldable Phone, 65″ BD LCD, Printed OLED, 8K VR, Automotive, mini-LED


At SID Display Week 2019, BOE shows their latest 12.3″ Rollable Phone, 7.7″ Foldable Phone, many other flexible displays, UHD displays, micro-displays, other world-leading technologies and innovative applications such as their Smart driving experience brought by flexible display for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) comprising a smart driver cabin and a spliced display screen of three units in three rows with only 0.99 mm bezels allowing visitors to experience a brand-new in-car display solution of the future. In addition to flexible display applications, BOE also displays the world-leading UHD display solution called the BD CELL UHD display which features an ultra-high static contrast ratio of up to 1,000,000:1, a bit depth of 12 bit, and a black field brightness of less than 0.003 nits, BOE also presents a host of 8K products, including 75″ 8K 120Hz display, a 3.5″ 8K VR display, and 0.39″ 8K spliced VR display. Under the “8425 Strategy” (promote 8K, popularize 4K, replace 2K and make good use of 5G), BOE is now speeding up the application of 8K in many fields. Other leading-edge technologies and solutions that BOE shows at this show include the first ever HDR notebook featuring mini-LED, the 15.6″ oxide display with an ultra-high refresh rate of 240Hz, the 55″ inkjet-printed 4K OLED display, the 0.39″ micro-OLED AR display that enjoys the world’s largest pixel density of 5,644 PPI.

In the smart Automotive cabin, the information required for smart travel becomes part of the actual scene with the help of AR technology, the head-up display (HUD) can project useful information such as speed per hour and navigation onto the front windshield for the driver’s reference. In addition, BOE replaces the conventional in-car LCD with flexible display. The 12.3″ three-unit flexible display is backed by the OLED pixel compensation circuit technology developed by BOE, which can effectively improve the brightness uniformity of mid-sized OLED displays and provide better audiovisual experience for car users, BOE applies flexible AMOLED displays to transparent A-pillars, rearview mirrors to solve the problem of driver’s blind spots in automotive design. The flexible display can perfectly match the shape of the A-pillar and show data with delay shorter than one millisecond. With the help of camera, the images blocked by the A-pillar can be shown on the flexible display, thus eliminating blind spots in the field of view. By applying flexible display, the rearview mirror can also be customized according to the interior shape of the car. BOE’s smart cabin is equipped with a 6.39″ flexible display as a built-in rearview mirror, which makes it safer to drive the car even on rainy and snowy days, BOE also exhibited some innovative applications of in-car display, such as center console solution that supports gesture-based interaction and V-shaped mini-LED for cars. BOE’s high-end in-car display panels have been supplied to automakers in the United States, Germany, the UK, Japan and South Korea.

Qualcomm 8cx, 7nm ARM Laptop Windows 10 platform

Posted by – June 12, 2019

Qualcomm shows their 8cx ARM Powered Laptop platform. The 8cx is the first ARM Processor designed specifically for the Laptop market. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Compute Platform is the most extreme Snapdragon ever, combines the best of the smartphone with the power and performance of a premium laptop in ultra-thin, fanless form factors to deliver a superior Always On, Always Connected PC computing experience. The first 7nm PC platform, the Snapdragon 8cx supports transformative 5G experiences, multi-gigabit LTE, and multi-day battery life and marks the biggest generational performance increase ever in a Snapdragon platform.

Collabora shows Radxa ROCK Pi 4 running Panfrost open source Mali GPU driver


Collabora is at Embedded World 2019, showing their infrastructure for end-to-end, embedded software production, their work on software platforms with reproducible continuous builds, automate testing on hardware to increase productivity and quality control in embedded Linux. They demonstrate Debian-based platform creation with debos and testing on a Virtual Machine – for early identification of issues and regressions, Hardware automated testing of application development through video playing on a Rockchip platform (Chromebook Plus) with VPU decoding and GPU rendering using the Panfrost Open Source driver, Graphics stack development with automated testing, to show how Graphics enablement can be integrated on a Continous Integration pipeline. They also demonstrate two NEW Open Source GPU drivers, etnaviv for Vivante GPU running on an RDU2 Inflight Multimedia Entertainment Device (based on the i.MX6 series SOCs), provided by Zodiac Inflight Innovations, and Panfrost for ARM Mali Midgard & Bifrost GPU, running on a ROCK Pi 4 SBC, provided by Radxa.

Foundries.io Zephyr microPlatform (ZmP) at Embedded World 2019


Foundries.io demonstrates OpenThread on Zephyr with Blockchain data publishing controlling Smart Lights and Candy Dispenser – Foundries.io showcases their Zephyr microPlatform (ZmP) using OpenThread and 802.15.4. Providing an OpenThread gateway which acts as a smart speaker enabling users to issue voice commands like “Hey Google, turn it on” to turn on a light, or “Hey Google, start it” to dispense candy. The connected lights will be running ZmP with OpenThread, and the candy dispenser will using 6lowpan over BLE.

The Zephyr Project at Embedded World 2019


The Zephyr Project joins some 1,000 exhibitors at Embedded World in Nurnberg, Germany, with Zephyr Project members including Antmicro, Foundries.io, Intel, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP and SiFive, with offer interactive IoT demos powered by the Zephyr RTOS, which supports multiple hardware architectures and is built with safety and security in mind.

The Antmicro and Renode demo showcases how the open source Renode simulation framework that can be used to test multi-node Zephyr setups, including ARM and RISC-V based platforms. Using human-readable scripts and configuration, Renode allows you to easily create complex CI installations, enabling better testability of real products. You will see how to test production-ready code without the hassle of connecting multiple pieces of hardware together against corner-case conditions unachievable in testing rigs.

NXP i.MX 6SoloX (UDOO Neo) with RPMsg Protocol, a Multicore demo with Linux running on A9, Zephyr running on M4 – This demonstration shows how to leverage asymmetric co-processors of modern SoCs on the example of i.MX6SoloX and Udoo Neo board. The embedded Cortex-M4 core is running Zephyr RTOS which implements various low speed serial peripherals (UART, SPI, I2C) in software using GPIO. Cortex-M4 communicates with the embedded Cortex-A9 core running Linux Kernel using the RPMsg protocol. On the Linux side a kernel module is used to present implemented serial peripherals to the user space as regular serial, SPI or I2C interface (e.g. /dev/ttySx). The benefits of such approach consist in the possibility of extending existing set of peripherals without any additional hardware cost and the possibility to place selected peripheral at virtually any available GPIO pin. Thanks to exporting the interfaces to the user space, it can be accessed for example by a Python script.

Intel S1000 Speech Kit showcases basic Alexa functionality

Nordic Semiconductor Gaming Mouse, Zephyr on an nRF52-based low-latency, high report rate gaming mouse prototype

Zephyr on the Nordic nRF91 Development Kit, including a BLE to LTE gateway

SiFive Demo, Zephyr Running on a SiFive HiFive1 Development Board

Zephyr running as a guest on ACRN Hypervisor

Ampere eMAG Skylark 32-core ARM Server CPU

Posted by – March 26, 2019

eMAG is a family of high-performance ARM server processors designed by Ampere Computing. Ampere’s introduction of eMAG to the market concludes and follows on the X-Gene3 design started out by AppliedMicro. eMAG processors targets server workloads capable of taking advantage of a high core count with high throughput. First generation eMAG processors are based on the Skylark microarchitecture, a design that started out by AppliedMicro. Fabricated on TSMC’s 16FF+ process, those processors feature up to 32 cores operating at up to 3.3 GHz. DDR4 channels, up to 2666 MT/s with ECC; 1 TiB/socket I/O: 42 PCIe Gen 3 lanes TDP: Up to 125 W Second generation eMAG processors are planned for 2019. Those chips will be based on Ampere’s Quicksilver microarchitecture and feature an array of new features and improvements developed also with the new staff that Ampere hired over from Qualcomm’s ARM Server team.

SmugMug uses Amazon AWS EC2 A1 ARM Server Instance, 40% cheaper than x86

Posted by – March 26, 2019
Category: Servers, Amazon, MWC, Ubuntu

SmugMug achieves 40% cost savings by migrating their photo-serving tier to EC2 A1 instances. SmugMug is able to move their software stack (PHP, Nginx, HAProxy) to A1 instances with minimal effort. And getting everything up and running on A1 instances was like any other EC2 instance for SmugMug.

Nordic Semiconductor nRF9160 ARM Cortex-M33 SiP with LTE-M/NB-IoT


The Nordic Semiconductor nRF9160 is a compact, highly-integrated Low power System-in-Package with integrated LTE-M/NB-IoT modem and GPS for cellular IoT (cIoT) designs, featuring ARMv8-M Arm Cortex-M33 application processor solely for applications, a full LTE modem, RF Front End (RFFE) and power management system. Nordic Semiconductor claims that the nRF9160 is the most compact, complete and energy-efficient cellular IoT solution on the market. The integrated modem supports both LTE-M and NB-IoT and can operate globally removing any need for regional variants. All power saving features including eDRX and PSM are supported as is with IPv4/IPv6 support up to transport and security (TCP/TLS) level. The modem firmware is upgradable via secure, encrypted Firmware Over The Air (FOTA) updates. The Arm Cortex-M33 application processor is supported by 1MB of flash and 256kB RAM making advanced application development possible in a single device solution. A GPS receiver is integrated into the radio offering various modes of operation to suit a wide selection of applications that employ location-tracking functionality. A broad selection of general interfaces and peripherals and are included on nRF9160 including 12-bit ADC, RTC, SPI, I²C, I²S, UARTE, PDM and PWM. Security is best-in-class with Arm TrustZone technology for isolation and protection of normal and secure zones for firmware and elements of hardware including memory and peripherals. Arm TrustZone helps build solid and secure ioT applications that feature secure boot, trusted firmware updates and root of trust implementations without performance compromise. Arm CryptoCell enhances security still further by offering cryptographic and security resources to help to protect your IoT applications from various attack threats. CryptoCell is designed for high performance cryptography solutions optimized for energy-constrained devices. The nRF9160 supports both SIM and eSIM for connection and authentication with mobile network operators. The nRF9160 hardware and development kits are now in production and is suitable for full end-to-end sensor to cloud development.

Thea Aldrich, Zephyr Project Evangelist and Developer Advocate

Posted by – March 24, 2019

Interview with Thea Aldrich at Linaro Connect talking about Project Zephyr the open source project for the embedded world. You can read more about her at https://www.zephyrproject.org/meet-thea-aldrich/

Open Source Android Kernels with Todd Kjos of Google and Bero


Todd Kjos of the Android Kernel team at Google, and Bero of the Linaro Mobile Group, talk at Linaro Connect Vancouver, they talk about running Android on the mainline kernel, trying to get closer to mainline, enabling test boards and devices to run mainline Linux. Getting some of the Android specific things that were kept out of the tree into the Linux tree.

$1709 Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (7th Gen) 2019 with second monitor, $1929 Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga (4th Gen) 2019

Posted by – March 18, 2019

This is the 7th Generation Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon to be available from June 2019, weighing only 1.08 kg, comes with the latest 8th Gen Intel Core i5 or i7 processors, optional 4K or 1080p display, optionally with Dolby Vision HDR, optional carbon fiber weave top cover, with a thickness of only 14.95mm, up to 16GB of RAM, up to 2TB of PCIe SSD storage, up to 15 hours battery, two USB 3.1 ports, dual USB-C Thunderbolt ports, and also they provide a 585gr light second monitor that simply connects by the USB Type-C port to add a second display while on the go. Lenovo is also introducing the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga for 2019 moving Yoga to an aluminum design, with many of the same processor, storage and more.

$999 Lenovo ThinkPad T490 and the thinner T490S

Posted by – March 16, 2019

Lenovo ThinkPad T490 is a 1.46kg lightweight 14″ business laptop with display options starting from FHD 250nit Antiglare to FHD IPS Touchscreen, 400nit with PrivacyGuard to WQHD 2560×1440 500nit 100% Adobe color gamut with Dolby Vision high-dynamic-range (HDR) display. Redesigned bezels enable a larger screen area than previous models, tested against 12 military-grade requirements and more than 200 quality checks, up to 16.1 hours of battery life with rapid Charge that provides 80% capacity in just an hour. Optional worldwide LTE-A card, ThinkPad Pro Dock, USB-C side mechanical docking station, ThinkShutter physical camera cover, optional IR (infrared) camera and optional touch fingerprint reader. Runs on the 8th Gen Intel Core i5/i7 vPro, up to 48GB RAM, up to 1TB PCIe SSD, Intel UHD 620 GPU or the NVIDIA GeForce MX250, Dolby Audio Premium, Dual far-field microphones and more.

Lenovo ThinkPad X390

Posted by – March 14, 2019

Lenovo Thinkpad X390 is a 13.3″ Open Rich Display business laptop with a 12″ footprint, the follow on to the long lasting Lenovo X200 series, with 18 hour battery can be charged to 80 percent capacity in 60 minutes, up to 13.3″ FHD (touch & non-touch), IPS, HD, 400-nit touchscreen with PrivacyGuard. Lenovo Thinkpad x390 features up to 8th Gen Intel Core i7 with vPro, up to 1TB fast PCIe SSD storage, up to 32 GB 2400 MHz soldered DDR4 RAM. Lenovo Thinkpad x390 offers up to 32gb of ram and 1tb ssd. The Lenovo Thinkpad x390 features an optional LTE modem. Prices start from $1300 USD. PrivacyGuard, PrivacyAlert, ThinkShutter, dual far-field microphones and Dolby Audio Premium, global LTE capability, 1.22kg weight. 12 military-grade requirements and more than 200 quality checks, USB-C side mechanical docking station, optional Hybrid IR (infrared) camera, optional touch fingerprint reader.

Lenovo ThinkPad X390 Yoga

Posted by – March 14, 2019

ThinkPad X390 Yoga is a 13.3″ FHD (IPS, 300-nit, anti-reflective, anti-smudge) 2-in-1 laptop for business with integrated ThinkPad Pen Pro, enhanced security, long 14.5 hours battery with fast 60min charge to 80 percent capacity, dual far-field microphones, optional global LTE-A WWAN capability, and more. Connects to ThinkPad Pro Dock via USB-C side mechanical docking, optional Hybrid IR (infrared) camera and touch fingerprint reader to securely log in with Windows Hello, ThinkShutter physical camera cover. Runs on 8th Gen Intel Core processors with Intel UHD 620 GPU, with fast PCIe Up to 1TB SSD storage, Up to 16 GB 2400 MHz DDR4, enhanced audio with Dolby Audio Premium. 2.93 lbs (1.32Kg) weight.

Samsung Galaxy S10 teardown, reveals the Samsung Exynos 9820

Posted by – March 14, 2019

ChipRebel has provided this video of their teardown of the Galaxy S10 (also see their Exynos 9820 photos here: https://www.chiprebel.com/exynos-9820/) which has the 8nm LPP Exynos 9820 with Samsung’s dual custom cores, dual ARM Cortex-A75 and quad ARM Cortex-A55 and Mali-G76 MP12 GPU and Samsung’s most advanced NPU. With LTE Category 20 for up to 2.0Gbps download speed with 8x carrier aggregation (CA) and up to 316Mbps upload speed support. This phone amazingly can support encoding and decoding of of up to 8K30p.

You can find the High-res images of Samsung’s Exynos 9820 SoC inside the Galaxy S10 at https://www.chiprebel.com/galaxy-s10-teardown/ and you can subscribe to ChipRebel on YouTube here