New Freescale I.MX7 Processor Line Takes Aim At IoT

DeviceGuru writes: Freescale has unveiled a new i.MX7 embedded processor family. The family launches with two parts having one or two Cortex-A7 cores, along with Cortex-M4 microcontroller cores, and boasts much lower power consumption than the company's popular i.MX6 embedded processors, making it ideal for power constrained Internet of Things applications. The i.MX7 is Freescale's second i.MX family to use Coretex-A7 cores, and its first to move backward in performance, although significantly upward in power efficiency — a testament to how IoT is impacting the semiconductor business. Like the recently introduced i.MX6 UltraLite, the initial i.MX7 parts are limited to 2D image processing in hardware. An ARMv8 Cortex-A53 based i.MX8 line is also under development, and is expected to be announced next year with 2016 or 2017 availability.

Comments

Behind

[Ixpath]

I'm currently working on an IoT project that uses a Freescale iMX6 chip and they are so far behind other ARM chip companies it's ridiculous. Next year they will have a 28nm chip, *sigh*. Maybe, firing their entire iMX group wasn't a good idea after all.

Re:Behind

[known_coward_69]

the original iphone had a pretty slow CPU compared to everyone else. wait till money pours into the new sector and this will spur development. 15 years ago ARM was in the "embedded" space which was low margins and low volumes. now i can go through a whole day using only ARM cpu based devices and no windows.

Re:Behind

[w1zz4]

Well, if it's that much behind, why are using it insted of a better chip?

Re:Behind

[ArcadeMan]

Now i can go through a whole day using only ARM cpu based devices and no windows.

It must suck not being able to see outside.

Re:Behind

[Anonymous Coward]

> 15 years ago ARM was in the "embedded" space which was low margins and low volumes

Most of ARMs may have been 'low margins', the cheapest chips sold for 50cents in large volumes but it was not 'low volume'. In in the early 2000s they were doing a billion ARM chips a year.

There was also a higher margin side:

"""2001 - ARM has 76.8pc share of the 32-bit embedded RISC chip market."""

Re: Behind

[Ixpath]

If the individuals responsible for choosing the ARM manufacturer had fully understood the thermal implications at the time, I think they would not have chosen Freescale. Now it's mostly just inertia.

Re: Behind

[Ixpath]

I'm not talking about ARM. I'm talking about Freescale. The Qualcomm and Samsung ARM chips aren't as far behind for example.

Re:Behind

[vovin]

Based on silicon and mfg or based on support and software support?
And at what quantities?

Yeah, last year Qualcomm was all the shiz. But can you move 100K+ parts/month? No? Then it's off the table.

Broadcom, Nvidia, even TI (worse parts and massively worse support, IMO) same, same same.
Bottom line? I'd recommend Freescale 9 times out of 10 for any of the medium to small players if I was looking for a high end ARM SOC.

For the smallish player Freescale is you best supported higher end ARM SOC. The fact that they have almost (or none?) of their own custom IP works in your favor.

Need a tweak to the VPU or GPU interface [kernel change] on TI, NVidia, Boradcom, Qualcomm ? Answer -- not possible as they licensed the IP or giving out any programming information about the IP (NVidia .. looking at you) is a non-starter, even under NDA, assuming the above 100K (or 1M?) / month is not already pre-purchased.

If you are looking to build 10M phones your damn right to go to Qualcomm .. the LTE alone makes it the cheapest option. Of course you just have to do 'whatever Samsung is doing' because the support for customer #2 is pathetic -- but far from non-existent.

Perhaps your IoT project has no business using a higher end ARM SOC and you *should* be using a low end ARM Cortex M0, M3. or. M4. My preference in this space is an M3 -- STM32L, likely because I have used it successfully. However there are many options in the low power ARM space, lots of which are better targeted for IoT (or pretty much anything else with a dedicated purpose). A high end arm SOC is a 5 year old PC on single chip. HowTF is that a 'thing' for the Io 'things' ?

Kids today .. git off my lawn.

Re:Behind

[tlhIngan]

Yeah, last year Qualcomm was all the shiz. But can you move 100K+ parts/month? No? Then it's off the table.

Broadcom, Nvidia, even TI (worse parts and massively worse support, IMO) same, same same.
Bottom line? I'd recommend Freescale 9 times out of 10 for any of the medium to small players if I was looking for a high end ARM SOC.

Not correct. Qualcomm has plenty of support companies who will gladly do smaller quantities. Sure you won't get the personalized support that Samsung and all the other big guys get, but they have access to the same resources - basically these companies aggregate a bunch of smaller companies into a bigger one, plus handling all the common questions because everyone asks them.

In fact, all you have to do is ask Qualcomm and they'll hand you the contact information for a company that'll help you out.

The reason for this was Qualcomm saw what happened to nVidia - back when Tegra was the SoC - nVidia was not talking to anyone moving less than 1M units. Qualcomm took over and they notice there's a lot of interest in their chips, but they know they can't support every company who only wants to do 1K, 10K, 100K units. So Qualcomm basically create a bunch of platforms to satisfy these smaller requests, and contracts companies to support them. (These SoCs demand high-precision PCBs which are costly to make, tricky to design, and take a LONG time to manufacture, so Qualcomm designs modules which adapts the complex PCBs to a simpler edge connector or board-to-board connector).

Re: Behind

[Ixpath]

So, you are telling me that the utilite2 is doing at least 100k per month?

I might be OK with Freescale if they didn't require you to use a windows only tool to flash the damn thing.

Re:Behind

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I use doors.

Re: Behind

[Anonymous Coward]

What windows only tool are you referring to?

Been working with iMX5 and iMX6 chips for years and never had to touch a Windows tool.

Now, regarding the iMX7 : this is not the chip you want. You want the iMX8 (that is the original iMX7, but after they fired the iMX team Freescale realized that the original iMX7 would never be on time ... so they released this piece of s in between)

Re:Behind

[Pinky's Brain]

Of course except for Sitara and i.MX6 the GPIO on ARM processors tends to be pathetic.

Re: Behind

[Anonymous Coward]

What windows-only tool for flashing what? Are you talking about i.mx6 boot-U-Boot-via-usb? Because I have a Linux tool for that...

Re:Behind

[geoskd]

Bottom line? I'd recommend Freescale 9 times out of 10 for any of the medium to small players if I was looking for a high end ARM SOC.

They'd be an idiot to listen to you. Freescale chips are more expensive, and less capable than almost every other player out there. They've been riding on inertia for the last ten years. They haven't done much by way of improvements in that time, their flagship development environment hasn't changed (not even bug fixes), and to boot they are the only chip vendor left who charges for their dev environment. If you want GHz+ processors for cheap, you want Broadcom. if you want SOC and / or large numbers of I/O, you want cypress. if you want both, you can buy both for less than the cost of the freescale chips, come out way ahead in development time, and have fewer problems with your PCBs being manufactured. In short, there is no compelling reason to even consider the MX7 series, and lots of reasons to dismiss freescale out of hand.

Freescale end-of-lifed the processors we used to use (in and of itself a bad sign). When we looked at the replacements, the freescale options were 2x-3x more expensive, availability was questionable, and freescale refused to make any lifecycle promises (as opposed to atmel and ST who both promised 15 years, and Cypress who haven't EOL'd a single processor without providing a pin-compatible replacement.

To add insult to injury, the Freescale dev tools (code warrior) cost big $$$ in yearly license fees, and they are buggy as hell. Their compiler still does some wickedly hokey shit. I can compile the exact same code on the same machine twice, and one compile works, while the other one fails. We had a license expire and instead of giving us a simple "Your license is expired" error, it gave us a never ending stream of cryptic errors. It took our IT guys a week on the phone with support to find out that the license was expired. even the codewarrior people were stumped at first...

At the end of the day, go with Cypress. you'll be happier in the short run and in 5 years you wont be scrambling to redesign your products because freescale EOL'd your processor on you without providing a pin-compatible replacement...

Re:Behind

[geoskd]

Of course except for Sitara and i.MX6 the GPIO on ARM processors tends to be pathetic.

Cypress PSOC 5. Theres a reason they sell more embedded processors than anyone else.

Re:Behind

[geoskd]

Where I work, we had used exclusively freescale processors. The founder of the company had used them in school, and was unwilling to even consider alternatives. About 5 years ago, they had a massive product flop as a result, and he stepped away from daily involvement in the company. Since then, we have been dropping freescale as fast as we can design away from their processors.

Recently that process has been accelerated because freescale EOL'd the most frequently used processor, and with no pin-compatible part, it is worth our time to simply switch away from them as fast as we can now. We're going with the Cypress PSOC series. The dev environment is excellent, and some of the 5 series processors have so much stuff in them we have been able to reduce our parts count by half or better. They're also vastly cheaper than the freescale processors, which makes us conclude that the companies founders got where they are more by luck than skill.

Re: Behind

[Ixpath]

Are you working with Yocto and the iMX6SL EVK? I need a complete replacement for mfgtool, right now it's killing my workflow.

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

600+ pins BGA package...

Factories in China will not take it. I can't see how it will gain traction in IoT if you can't manufacture it for cheap.

Re:Hmm

[viperidaenz]

You mean like the Allwinner A80 SoC, in a 636 ball BGA package?
It's a Chinese manufactured chip designed for bottom-dollar tablets and set-top boxes.
I wouldn't be surprised if any factory outside of China has put one on a board.

Re:Hmm

[unixisc]

It's been at least 10 years since Chinese factories are just as competent w/ BGAs as they are w/ PDIPs

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly one might start to wonder about US factories at this point.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there any left?

Low power of only 250 Watts!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow! Only 250 Watts!

Re: Low power of only 250 Watts!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe your browser didn't show the 'micro' prefix?

Re:Behind like AMD is behind?

[Anonymous Coward]

That big of a behind?

IoT

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what IoT needs? A clever derogatory name. Like glasshole is to google glass wearers. Something that really sticks.

Re:IoT

[ArcadeMan]

Internet Open Trousers?

Re: IoT

[Anonymous Coward]

Backwards toi?

Re:IoT

[Anonymous Coward]

Imposition of Tyranny?

Re:IoT

[Greystripe]

So we need something to ID IoT? Hmm.. wonder how we can ID IoT

e-Ink?

[ChunderDownunder]

I have an iMX5 in an e-reader device, for which it has custom display support.

So I'm wondering if these latest chips will make it to the next-gen Rakuten/Amazon devices.