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New Freescale I.MX6 SoCs Include IoT-focused UltraLite
DeviceGuru writes: Freescale has announced three new versions of its popular i.MX6 SoCs, including new DualPlus and QuadPlus parts featuring enhanced GPUs and expanded memory support, and a new low-end, IoT focused 528MHz UltraLite SoC that integrates a more power-efficient, single-core ARM Cortex-A7 architecture. The UltraLite, which will be available in a tiny 9x9mm package, is claimed by Freescale to be the smallest and most energy-efficient ARM based SoC. It has a stripped-down WXGA interface but adds new security, tamper detection, and power management features. All the new Freescale i.MX6 SoCs are supported with Linux BSPs and evaluation kits.
It's great that Freescale is making a version of the ultralite that's easier to manufacture - but it'd be even better if they had a non-BGA version. BGA means "ball grid array", and it's one of the more difficult component in terms of electronics assembly.
Some companies charge a 3x premium if there are any BGAs at all. Having version that has the pins on the side (QFP), even if it was huge, or had less functionality, would allow for easier prototyping and assembly.
There'd be a market for it.
Neat.
We use the freescale processors where I work, in no small part due to an inexplicable bias on the part of one of the founders of the company. Now that he is no longer actively involved in the engineering process, we are leaving freescale and if we never look back it'll be too soon. Their processors cost 5x what we are paying for the ST and Cypress replacements, and the freescale dev tools (codewarrior) suck. To add insult to injury, they are the only major CPU vendor left that charges for the dev tools (did I mention they suck). If you want awesome SOC processors and a sweet dev toolchain, look at the Cypress PSOC 4 / 5 series processors. Thanks to these suckers, our new designs are 40% smaller, and cost between $10 and $30 less because we have been able to replace a lot of off-board parts with PSOC functionality.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
A couple of things in their defense, their processors seem pretty well documented, and they DO support GCC based (Yocto) sw setups for the chips we use. We're pretty big on PowerPC, still, but some of us can see the handwriting on the wall -- ARM has won.
A9 cores are old and slow.
Why not upgrade to A15 or A17?
BSP? Why do vendors still insist on using that antiquated bullshit TLA? If your damn peripheral code isn't in the mainline tree, it probably sucks. Hooray for shoddy code developed by interns.
Wait, just about every SoC ARM kernel is built from a fork. Idiots.
Seems a shame that the heirs to the 68xx legacy these days just put out commodity standard architecture (ie ARM, PPC, etc) chips.
Is Freescale doing anything with the 68000 series these days? I assume the related but not quite the same ColdFire is still in production, but last I looked that hadn't advanced very much since the last 68060s in the 1990s.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Somebody should drop a note to Freescale to let them know that at the bottom of the thread Slashdot made for their new SoC, Slashdot listed the following as 'Related Links'.
Those just seem like rather unrelated links. Haven't I seen Freescale display ads on Slashdot in the past? Do they know how poorly Slashdot thinks of their products? Or is Slashdot just really sloppy and borderline incompetent?
There are a bunch of really spiffy Coldfires (I have used several in products). My big problem with the Coldfires is that Freescale (now bought by NXP?) has long resisted making newer versions with either the speed or the memory to compete with the avalanche of ARMS. If you compare the ARM and Coldfire architectures, there are some interesting similarities and also so interesting points where they each do something the other does not (down at the ones and zeros level). The are about equal in code density and performance at equal clock speeds, but Freescale has not, to my knowledge, made a coldfire that goes anywhere near the clock speeds commonly available on ARMs. I suspect that when they jumped on the ARM bandwagon with their "me-too" Kinetis(?) chips they must have made a bad board room decision to transition from a company in charge of its own IP to a another fully-dependent ARM cloner and they put all their effort into that; it probably gave a short bump to their stock valuations to get stock options and bonuses for managers before requiring worker layoffs....
If you are not working from a BSP and embedding Linux (and really, this is becoming too common among lazy developers), I have always found it far easier to bring-up a Freescale Coldfire design the first time, IMHO.
I am using the i.MX6 inside the cubox-i from SolidRun. It works nicely and very stable as a home server with a standard linux distro (I use an unmodifie Debian 8.0). It has 2 USB ports, gigabit ethernet (which delivers around 500 MBit), and even an eSATA port. Also Openelec dirstibutes a nice image with Kodi for the (higher-end versions of the) Cubox-i.
My main painpoint is the lack of open source support for the GPU. This makes it pain to use it with a display and keyboard as very low power desktop. If that part would be fixed, I would be happy to get more i.MX6 systems.
Yay! Awesome!
What does all that shit mean?