The development team behind Android said that it no longer recommends RenderScript as the optimal way to run computationally-intensive code on the GPU or CPU without having to make use of the NDK or GPU-specific APIs and will deprecate the feature in Android 12. 

Instead, developers will have access to an open-source library that contains highly-tuned CPU implementations for all Basic Linear Algebra Subprogram (BLAS) intrinsics. The library executes faster on the CPU when compared to RenderScript.

Android recommends migrating RenderScript scripts to the cross-platform Vulkan API. Additional details are available here.

Xilinx introduces Kria Portfolio
The Kria SOM Portfolio contains adaptive system-on-modules for accelerating innovation and AI applications on the edge.

Kria K26 SOM is built on top of the Zynq UltraScale+™ MPSoC architecture, which features a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor, more than 250 thousand logic cells, and a H.264/265 video codec.

Within the portfolio, Kria K26 SOM targets vision AI applications in smart cities and smart factories and the Xilinx SOM roadmap includes a wide-range of products for size and cost-constrained applications. 

Additional details are available here.

ELISA Project expands its global ecosystem
The ELISA (Enabling Linux in Safety Applications) Project announced that Codethink, Horizon Robotics, Huawei Technologies, NVIDIA and Red Hat joined its ecosystem. 

The project aims to create a shared set of tools and processes to help companies build and certify Linux-based safety-critical applications and systems

“The primary challenge is selecting Linux components and features that can be evaluated for safety and identifying gaps where more work is needed to evaluate safety sufficiently,” said Shuah Khan, Chair of the ELISA Project Technical Steering Committee and Linux Fellow at the Linux Foundation. “We’ve taken on this challenge to make it easier for companies to build and certify Linux-based safety-critical applications by exploring potential methods to enable engineers to answer that question for their specific system.”

CodeLogic announces $16 million funding
CodeLogic announced that it secured $16 million in Series A funding that it will use to map complex software architecture and navigate application dependencies.

CodeLogic provides a centralized map of software architectures and reveals deep interconnectivity of application environments in real-time, helping developers reveal unknown connections to mitigate risk. 

“CodeLogic provides both a living map and a navigational tool for increasingly complex software systems,” said Greg Wunderle, CEO of CodeLogic, Inc. “Where other tools on the market only reveal parts of the whole picture, our technology offers a breakthrough solution. We remove the guesswork from the equation so developers can get unstuck and deploy code faster, with fewer code emergencies along the way.”