Remember Linaro? How could you forget, right? The non-profit engineering organization that formed back at Computex 2010 have been plugging away for over 1.5 years now, and its latest development involves everyone’s fav-o-rite build of Android: Ice Cream Sandwich. The corporate has just released ICS builds supporting accelerated graphics on two of its member’s budget friendly development boards: the Samsung Origen and ST-Ericsson Snowball. The outfit already displayed videos of Android 4.0.1 running on TI’s PandaBoard and Freescale’s i.MX53, and the accelerated graphics support that was made available today utilizes the ARM Mali-400 processor. For those unaware, developers may be able to create optimized Linux-based devices with the support of Linaro, and if you are in a single of these member groups, you’ll also enjoy DS-5 with Gator and libjpeg-turbo support. Head on past the break for a smattering of videos.
Cambridge, UK – 21 December 2011 – Linaro, a not-for-profit engineering organization consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture, today announced the provision of builds of Android Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) supporting accelerated graphics on two of its member’s reasonably priced development boards: the Samsung Origen and ST-Ericsson Snowball boards.
Just over a month ago, within an afternoon of Google’s release of the 4.0.1 ICS version of Android, Linaro showed videos of it running at the Texas Instruments (TI) PandaBoard and soon after that at the Freescale i.MX53 Quick Start board, the Samsung Origen board and ST-Ericsson’s Snowball board. The accelerated graphics support that was made available today uses the ARM Mali-400 graphics processor utilized by two of those boards. This graphics processor is integrated with a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor: at the Samsung Origen board in Samsung’s Exynos 4210 SoC, and at the ST-Ericsson Snowball board in ST-Ericsson’s NovaTM A9500 SoC. Users of those boards can view videos of those latest builds on Linaro’s YouTube channel and download the accelerated builds for the Snowball and Origen boards on Linaro’s releases.linaro.org website.
Developers may be able to create optimized Linux-based devices with the support of Linaro. As an instance, Linaro uses the most recent GCC 4.6 toolchain to construct Android, enabling Linaro’s Android to outperform standard Android builds in benchmarks and real-world tasks. The 4.6 toolchain allows developers to optimize for the most recent SoCs like ST-Ericsson’s Nova A9500 processor and Samsung’s Exynos4210, which ends up in a higher user experience. Furthermore, the toolchain gives early access to the performance improvements Linaro have been developing within the next release of GCC, in addition to the various correctness fixes identified and provided through working with the Linaro community. For example, the Linaro 4.6 toolchain includes features to permit software to manually or automatically parallelize compute tasks around the multiple cores within the chips.
Linaro operates openly, and these accelerated builds are the most recent downloads enabling advanced product development on hardware from its member companies. Linaro’s goal is to supply consolidated and optimized open source software building blocks that supply companies with a foundation on which they are able to rapidly build and deliver innovative, differentiated solutions.
Join us for Linaro Connect Q1.12
Linaro Connect is held every three to four months to bring the Linux on ARM community together to work at the latest system-on-chip (SoC) developments, plan new engineering efforts and hold engineering hacking sessions. These events give the Linux community a possibility to join the Linaro team and help to define the ARM tools, Linux kernels and builds of key Linux distributions including Android and Ubuntu on member SoCs. Join us for our next event February 6-10th in San Francisco, California. Learn more at connect.linaro.org
About Linaro
Linaro is a not-for-profit engineering organization engaged on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture, including the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) toolchain, the Linux kernel, ARM power management, graphics and multimedia interfaces. Linaro’s key value is in engaged on generic ARM technology that’s common to all ARM SoC vendors. During this way engineering costs are shared, in preference to each vendor having to implement core software technology themselves, which has historically led to fragmentation and overhead in maintaining code that can not be upstreamed to the mainline Linux kernel and other open source projects. Linaro’s output is utilized by its members, and by distributions including Android, Ubuntu and OEM/ODM customized versions of Linux. Linaro’s goals are to deliver value to its members by enabling their engineering teams to spotlight differentiation and product delivery, and to cut back time to marketplace for OEM/ODMs delivering open source based products using ARM technology. For additional information, please visit www.linaro.org
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