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

[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

[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

[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...