Marvell today announced the new OCTEON Fusion processors and a new line in the OCTEON TX2 family.

It's already been six years since the collapse of Calxeda as the first promising ARM server company. With that, the Linux kernel upstream developers are looking at dropping the Calxeda platform support.

Arm has been developing the ASTC encoder as the texture compressor for Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) as open-source but until last week was carrying a restrictive license.

While the Linux 5.5 kernel isn't even released yet, it's ideally coming out on Sunday should there not be a one week delay. But in any event Arm's Will Deacon has already sent in the pull request of the ARM architecture changes for Linux 5.6.

Marvell has been preparing the Octeon TX2 processor support for the GCC compiler, their next-generation version of the (originally Cavium) infrastructure/network processors now based on their ThunderX2 line.

Back in October 2018 was a patch series out of Linaro for "thermal pressure" support in the Linux kernel for providing better task placement when CPUs are running hot/overheating to the extent their CPU frequencies are being downclocked/limited. Out this weekend is a revised version of that Linux thermal pressure support.

Building on earlier GCC commits for Arm's BFloat16 (BF16) support and other new extensions, a late change landing for GCC 10 is the command line options for targeting the ARMv8.6-A architecture and optionally toggling i8mm and BF16 extensions.

Following last week's Arm architecture updates for Linux 5.5, sent in via four pull requests on Thursday was all the new and improved hardware enablement for the SoCs and single-board computer platforms.

With the Linux 5.4 cycle we saw mainline support beginning to come together for some Qualcomm ARM Linux laptops while with Linux 5.5 another milestone is being achieved. There has been out-of-tree support in the works for getting the various consumer Snapdragon laptops working with Linux while those changes are slowly getting into the mainline kernel.

Catalin Marinas who oversees the 64-bit ARM (ARM64 / AArch64) architecture code within the mainline kernel has already submitted his pull request early for the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle beginning tonight or early on Monday.

Arm engineers have been working to speed-up the open-source Chromium web browser on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) and ultimately to flow back into Google's Chrome releases. Their focus has been around Windows-on-Arm with the growing number of Windows Arm laptops coming to market, but the Chromium optimizations also benefit the browser on Linux too.

The latest of LLVM's "sanitizers" being ported for the GCC compiler stack is the hardware-assisted address sanitizer (HWASAN).

While Ubuntu Touch has run on AArch64 hardware, to date their builds have been focused on 32-bit mode support. Fortunately, for select devices, they are now spinning 64-bit images.

Gaming on ARM-based boards like the Raspberry Pi will soon have the potential for running much better thanks to a series of ARM Assembly optimizations that were just merged into SDL2.

A minor optimization was merged into GCC 10 last week for benefiting those on Arm compiling their code with the GNU Compiler Collection.

Arm has outlined their architecture enhancements being introduced in ARMv8.6-A as their 2019 ARMv8 architecture update.

Seven years after the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO-1.75 Arm-based laptop entered production or nearly one decade since development began, it's now seeing mainline kernel support.

The ARM SoC platform and driver changes landed on Monday during the first full day of the Linux 5.4 merge window. There is some exciting ARM hardware support improvements for this kernel while doing away with some older platforms.

When it comes to ARM-powered workstation boards there hasn't been a whole lot to get excited about with the likes of the Socionext 96Boards Developerbox being quite expensive and not yielding good performance or featureful boards compared to alternative Intel/AMD/POWER workstation/enthusiast boards. One of the more promising ARM workstation boards we have been following is the HoneyComb LX2K (formerly the "ClearFog" board) and it's looking like it could end up being a decent offering in this space.

Arm has now joined Intel, HP Enterprise, Google, Microsoft, Dell EMC, and others in backing the new Compute Express Link (CXL) effort as the interconnect for future accelerators.

While not officially released yet, support for the ASpeed AST2600 is coming to the Linux 5.4 kernel.

While we've known Arm would be adding BFloat16 (BF16) support to their future processor designs, on Thursday they publicly provided more details on their plans for this new floating-point format to help AI / machine learning workloads with training and inference.

Thanks to funding from Arm Holdings and Crossbar, the PyPy folks working on their speedy Python JIT implementation have extended it to support 64-bit ARM (AArch64) with compelling performance results.

The Arm SoC/platform changes arrived a bit late to the Linux 5.3 merge window ending this weekend. The Arm SoC/platform changes were only sent in on Friday night but include Librem 5 Developer Kit support in terms of the DeviceTree bits as well as improving the NVIDIA Jetson Nano support and various other SoC/platform additions.

Due to summer holidays, the 64-bit ARM (AArch64/ARM64) architecture changes were already sent in days ago for the Linux 5.3 kernel merge window.

ARM Error Source Table is an extension of ACPI that provides a table for RAS errors. Support for this new error table is being worked on with the new "AEST" Linux kernel driver.

Arm's Komeda Linux DRM/KMS display driver for supporting their latest display IP such as the Mali D71 is seeing VRR support ala Adaptive-Sync / HDMI VRR.

NVIDIA announced this morning for ISC 2019 that they are bringing CUDA to Arm beyond their work already for supporting GPU computing with lower-power Tegra SoCs.

Arm's Wilco Dijkstra landed some more optimizations this past week in the Glibc development code for the upcoming GNU C Library 2.30 release.

If there's one Arm hardware launch I am looking forward to this year of known products in the pipeline, it would certainly be SolidRun's ClearFog mini-ITX workstation product.