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.

Comments

Freescale = SUCK

[geoskd]

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.

Re:Freescale = SUCK

[geoskd]

Huh? This article is about an application processor (imx6), and you are comparing it to a cortex M microcontroller (PSOC series which is more equivalent to the freescale Kinetis series) They are different things.

Corporate culture is the same no matter which product line you're talking about. Ever since Motorola ejected Freescale in '04, they have gotten more expensive, they stopped developing half their product lines, and they are gauranteeing their product line for 10 years! a whole whopping ten years? The 68000 series Motorola introduced in the late 70s is still in production. If they cant offer at least 20,I dont want to hear about it. Their track record over the last ten years gives me serious pause before considering their product lines, and given the power, availability and cost of the arm processors this has to compete with, I'm willing to pretty much write them off. If they hadn't been gouging us for the sub-par dev tools, I might have even been willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but when they have 8 year old open bugs on a tool that they are charging $ks in yearly maintenance contracts for, I have little sympathy. If I need power, give me a broadcom. if I need IO, give me a Cypress, if I need both, i'll plant both and still come out way cheaper than anything Freescale has put out thus far.

And just for giggles if I need massive amounts of IO, I can plant 3 100 pin PSoCs, a quad core broadcom armv8, have more horsepower than the imx6, and still cost less. As an added bonus, I can save a pile of money by not having to deal with the god-damn BGAs. Just like Intel, Freescale is chasing a market that is caving in on itself. These days, you're arm or you're nobody. It should also be noted that unless you are planning on selling M+ units, it'll be cheaper and vastly easier to simply buy RPi2s, and build a custom daughter board than it ever will be to produce your own GHz speed boards. The days of custom PCBs with state of the practice or better CPUs are over. Any design house that sells low to middle volume products are either moving to off the shelf Pi / BBB based systems or are actively being made irrelevant by one or more startups. Even higher volume stuff that can fit a Pi or BBB is likely to benefit from being able to drop one of them in and avoid huge amounts of dev time which means faster time to market which means bigger market share.