3 ms·

The lack of public datasheets makes this useless for individuals and people who want truly open hardware (like the Novena). Looks like the Freescale i.MX6 from

by q3k 10y ago

The lack of public datasheets makes this useless for individuals and people who want truly open hardware (like the Novena). Looks like the Freescale i.MX6 from 2011 are still the most powerful ARM SoCs you can buy if you don't want to sign NDAs.

coderjames 10y ago
Hopefully that will change in 1Q2017 when Xilinx finally releases to production their new Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC[1]. It has a quad-A53 cluster and a dual-R5 cluster. It is still in early-access so I can't say much more beyond that (we're designing it into a system so I'm constrained by the early-access NDA). [1] http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/zynq-ultrascale-mpsoc.html http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/zynq-ultr...
- dougmany 10y ago
  That looks nice. CAN, SATA 3.1, GigE, Usb 3.0 on top of what you mentioned. I wonder what the power draw is on this.
monocasa 10y ago
It's really unfortunate too, because NXP nuked quite a bit of the NDA free support for the i.MX6 after they acquired Freescale. There's now tons of dead links, and they even removed stuff like a bunch of the SD Card images for their Sabre boards. When we asked where that stuff went we were directed to some crappy Indian outsourcing firm that kept it behind a $19,000 pay wall. I'm really happy that one of our more seasoned engineers essentially locally mirrors everything he can download when he starts a new design just for this circumstance.
AceJohnny2 10y ago
Yeah, working in the SoC industry (closer to the silicon side), I'm regularly frustrated at the gulf between the state of the art and what's usefully available to the public. I'd love to have a multi-core ARM64 with integrated PCIe, SATA (NVMe!), USB3, IOMMUs, maybe a few Cortex-Rs around for some real-time/MCU-type work with GPIOs and stuff... All of which I've seen and worked on in the industry. But none of that is open to the public :(
- tw04 10y ago
  So serious question since you worj in the industry. Given the amount of time, energy, and money that would go into that design - if it were completely open source, what would prevent some Chinese firm coming along and making a knockoff for half the price?
  - AceJohnny2 10y ago
    Having the register specs and behavior of the various blocks inside the chip is a lot like having the API of a library. It lets you use it, but doesn't tell you how it's implemented internally, which is where most of the secret sauce happens. This register/spec is what a lot of people like me wish for. There are two levels of "open source" for hardware: the first is where the registers and behavior are documented, allowing programmers to write their own drivers for the hardware, but for moderately complex stuff doesn't get you far for copying it. The second level is where the implementation details of the chip (the Verilog or VHDL description of its behavior) are open-sourced. Only the latter would let you "easily" create a knockoff, and even that isn't within reach of any household hacker, as the base cost of fabbing a chip is still in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but yeah that would be within reach of an undercutting competitor. (there's even a third layer of open source where the Verilog/VHDL is turned into the final layout tuned for the fab, think of it like having the source-code vs the final assembly for a given architecture. That step is costly too)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

by q3k 10y ago

coderjames 10y ago

Hopefully that will change in 1Q2017 when Xilinx finally releases to production their new Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC[1]. It has a quad-A53 cluster and a dual-R5 cluster. It is still in early-access so I can't say much more beyond that (we're designing it into a system so I'm constrained by the early-access NDA). [1] http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/zynq-ultrascale-mpsoc.html http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/zynq-ultr...

dougmany 10y ago
That looks nice. CAN, SATA 3.1, GigE, Usb 3.0 on top of what you mentioned. I wonder what the power draw is on this.

monocasa 10y ago

It's really unfortunate too, because NXP nuked quite a bit of the NDA free support for the i.MX6 after they acquired Freescale. There's now tons of dead links, and they even removed stuff like a bunch of the SD Card images for their Sabre boards. When we asked where that stuff went we were directed to some crappy Indian outsourcing firm that kept it behind a $19,000 pay wall. I'm really happy that one of our more seasoned engineers essentially locally mirrors everything he can download when he starts a new design just for this circumstance.

AceJohnny2 10y ago

Yeah, working in the SoC industry (closer to the silicon side), I'm regularly frustrated at the gulf between the state of the art and what's usefully available to the public. I'd love to have a multi-core ARM64 with integrated PCIe, SATA (NVMe!), USB3, IOMMUs, maybe a few Cortex-Rs around for some real-time/MCU-type work with GPIOs and stuff... All of which I've seen and worked on in the industry. But none of that is open to the public :(

tw04 10y ago
So serious question since you worj in the industry. Given the amount of time, energy, and money that would go into that design - if it were completely open source, what would prevent some Chinese firm coming along and making a knockoff for half the price?
- AceJohnny2 10y ago
  Having the register specs and behavior of the various blocks inside the chip is a lot like having the API of a library. It lets you use it, but doesn't tell you how it's implemented internally, which is where most of the secret sauce happens. This register/spec is what a lot of people like me wish for. There are two levels of "open source" for hardware: the first is where the registers and behavior are documented, allowing programmers to write their own drivers for the hardware, but for moderately complex stuff doesn't get you far for copying it. The second level is where the implementation details of the chip (the Verilog or VHDL description of its behavior) are open-sourced. Only the latter would let you "easily" create a knockoff, and even that isn't within reach of any household hacker, as the base cost of fabbing a chip is still in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but yeah that would be within reach of an undercutting competitor. (there's even a third layer of open source where the Verilog/VHDL is turned into the final layout tuned for the fab, think of it like having the source-code vs the final assembly for a given architecture. That step is costly too)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]