Andes NDS32 Architecture Seeing Many Additions With Linux 4.21

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 28 December 2018 at 05:45 AM EST. Add A Comment
HARDWARE
Early in the year with Linux 4.17 the kernel saw a port to the Andes NDS32 CPU architecture. With Linux 4.21, that CPU architecture is seeing a number of improvements.

AndesCore NDS32 is a 32-bit RISC-like architecture with clock rates hovering around 1GHz and these CPUs used by IoT applications, wearables, medical devices, and other low-power devices. Open-source support for NDS32 has existed for years by the company albeit out of tree until the kernel support landed in Linux 4.17.

With Linux 4.21, there are a number of big additions for NDS32 including support for perf, power management, FPU, hardware prefetcher, and rounding out things are also performance enhancements.

It's quite a big addition for this niche CPU architecture with more than 4,400 lines of new kernel code as part of this pull request.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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