intel

Heard of the Up SoC yet? It is an alternative to the Raspberry Pi but Intel Atom-based. It's a quad-core 64-bit CPU that includes an Intel HD video chipset with hardware acceleration for H.264, HEVC (H.265 decode) and VP8. They have designed it to have a super-set of the Raspberry Pi's hardware feature set in the same form factor. It draws 2 watts of power over 5VDC. Cost? About 3x that of the Raspberry Pi. I wonder if the Atom CPU in question is closer in performance to a Desktop PC CPU than the quad-core ARM in the Raspberry Pi 2?

If you have working WebGL in your browser, you should see a nice, interactive, 3D model below. No flash-plugin required.

Here is a video I've been waiting for by Jike Song from Intel. The KVM Forum 2014 was held in conjunction with the recent LinuxCon Europe and someone (from the Linux Foundation or the KVM Forum) has been processing and posting presentation videos to YouTube in a staggered fashion. About 13 hours ago this video appeared. When I noticed the topic on the KVM Forum schedule (along with the slide deck [PDF]) a week or two before the event, I was really looking forward to learning more.

The current implementation, so far as basic features go, seems to be fairly complete but it is currently targeted specifically at the Intel Haswell architecture using the i915 video driver. The presenter says that the approach taken should be adaptable to other GPU architectures beyond Intel. Their initial goal is to get the code released (it is under a dual GPL/MIT license) and to work with the KVM development community to get it upstreamed and part of KVM proper... and to work on more advanced feature implementation. As it stands now the basic features are present: hardware assisted GPU functionality for VMs in a shared fashion that offers 80-90% of native speed. Near the end of the presentation is a demo video that shows two Linux KVM VMs each running GPU intensive software (one game, one benchmark). As I understand it, when a GPU-driven application is displayed it is full-screen and there isn't currently a windowed mode to show more than one VM at a time. I do wonder how well 3D accelerated graphics would display over a remoting protocol like SPICE? Enjoy!