| title | weight |
|---|---|
Works on Arm News 2019-W07 |
7 |
With news this week from Phoronix, Techcrunch, Techrader, Liliputing, specifications from Wikichip, code on Github and Gitlab, plus commentary from the #worksonarm channel in the Packet Community Slack, it's Works on Arm News for February 15, 2019.
- Linux on Arm laptops
- NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier comparison
- MNT Reform open hardware laptop
- GCC vs LLVM Clang on aarch64
- Solar powered edge AI
- Windows 10 on your Raspberry Pi
- In other newsletters: DevOps'Ish
Phoronix and Liliputing report on the aarch64-laptops project, which seeks to bring a full Ubuntu distribution to several Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 based laptops sold as Windows 10 devices. A Github repository is available with the code and with images. This is a developer ready project, and if you've done drivers for things like graphics chips and trackpads you'll be welcomed here. Images have been built and are available now for the ASUS NovaGo TP370QL, HP Envy x2, and Lenovo Mixx 630.
- Liliputing
- Phoronix
- aarch64-laptops project on Github
- Snapdragon 835, Qualcomm
Phoronix looks at NVIDIA's Jetson AGX Xavier hardware, which outstrips the capabilities of most single-board Arm devices on the market today.
- NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier comparison, Phoronix
- Tegra Xavier, Wikichip
The MNT Reform is an open-hardware Arm laptop powered by an i.MX6, funded via Crowd Supply. They write:
Modern laptops have secret schematics, glued-in batteries, and mystery components all over. But Reform is the opposite – it invites both curious makers and privacy aware users to take a look under the hood, customize the documented electronics, and 3D-print their own parts.
The i.MX6 SoC has 4x 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A9, plenty to power a laptop but not ideal for high performance computing. If you are using remote infrastructure for your projects, and if you like to know exactly how your system runs and how to change or fix it, this may be the project for you.
- https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform
- https://mntmn.com/reform/
- i.MX6 series, NXP
- On Mastodon: @mntmn@mastodon.social
- @mntmn/reform on Github
Michael Larabel of Phoronix writes in "GCC 8/9 vs. LLVM Clang 7/8 Compiler Performance On AArch64" about tests done on the relative performance of these two modern C and C++ compilers. There are enough differences that neither one stands out as universally better, and clearly both compiler suites are continuing to improve.
- GCC vs LLVM on aarch64, Phoronix
- GCC, the GNU compiler collection on gnu.org
- Clang: a C language family frontend for LLVM on llvm.org
Techcrunch reports on an xnor.ai project to bring AI technologies to very small, solar powered devices at the edge of the network. The prototype device is the size of a cracker and has a low resolution camera, a small AI chip for running models, and enough of a solar cell to harvest energy from the Sun to keep a supercapacitor charged.
- Saltine sized solar power AI hardware, Techcrunch
- xnor.ai
- xnor.ai on Crunchbase
WOA is of course "Works on Arm", but it's also "Windows on Arm", notably for Windows 10. A team has put together and published a kit to get Windows 10 on Arm running on your Raspberry Pi 3. It's not exceptionally fast, but it runs!
- TechRadar
- WoA-project/WoA-Installer on Github
Chris Short has an interesting pipeline for working on his newsletter, which covers the DevOps side of the industry. I follow Chris at least as much for what he does as how he does it.