4 ms·

> If you haven't used a BB product, check out the thing that I think is the biggest upside of these...the built in pair of PRUs. Allwinner SoCs have an OpenRIS

> If you haven't used a BB product, check out the thing that I think is the biggest upside of these...the built in pair of PRUs. Allwinner SoCs have an OpenRISC microcontroller used for managing deep sleep modes. [0] I don't think anyone has figured out how to use it for other tasks yet, but it would be really great if there were more SoCs that included these kind of companion cores. [0] http://linux-sunxi.org/AR100 http://linux-sunxi.org/AR100

tyingq 10y ago
Oh, wow...companion core in a cheap board would be popular if someone figures out how to leverage it. The OrangePI Allwinner boards are amazingly inexpensive...$10 shipped, including WiFi (https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/New-Orange-Pi-Zero-H2-Quad-Core-Open-source-development-board-beyond-Raspberry-Pi/1553371_32760774493.html https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/New-Orange-Pi-Zero-...) Related, the lowRisc RISC-V project has a concept of minion cores: http://www.lowrisc.org/docs/memo-2014-001-tagged-memory-and-minion-cores/ http://www.lowrisc.org/docs/memo-2014-001-tagged-memory-and-...
joezydeco 10y ago
The iMX7 is a low power single or dual A7 core with an extra Cortex-M4 core on the die for real-time applications. Looks like they also took out some of the multimedia blocks to try and get the price down compared to the iMX6. http://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers-and-processors/arm-processors/i.mx-applications-processors/i.mx-7-processors/i.mx-7solo-processors-heterogeneous-processing-with-arm-cortex-a7-and-cortex-m4-cores:i.MX7S http://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers-and-processors/...
- monocasa 10y ago
  NXP also nuked a lot of their free support from orbit when they bought Freescale. Doing stuff like deleting a bunch of the SD card images for their sabre boards. We were told by NXP that some Indian support firm still had them for like... a $20k support contract. They really pissed us off with that crap, and our shop at least probably won't be buying NXP parts for a while.
  - joezydeco 10y ago
    Why couldn't you rebuild the SD image from Yocto?
    - kogepathic 10y ago
      > Why couldn't you rebuild the SD image from Yocto? Because the vendor should provide an SDK for development? It's fine if the vendor's image is based on Yocto, but you should still be able to download something from them with instructions.
      - joezydeco 10y ago
        Because the vendor should provide an SDK for development? That's literally what Yocto builds for you. you should still be able to download something from them with instructions. As an example, here's Freescale/NXP's github with their Yocto recipes. It was not "nuked from orbit" on the purchase. https://github.com/Freescale/fsl-community-bsp-platform https://github.com/Freescale/fsl-community-bsp-platform And a sample build guide: http://www.nxp.com/assets/documents/data/en/release-notes/IMX6L31428101RN.pdf?fsrch=1&sr=1&pageNum=1 http://www.nxp.com/assets/documents/data/en/release-notes/IM...

tyingq 10y ago

Oh, wow...companion core in a cheap board would be popular if someone figures out how to leverage it. The OrangePI Allwinner boards are amazingly inexpensive...$10 shipped, including WiFi (https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/New-Orange-Pi-Zero-H2-Quad-Core-Open-source-development-board-beyond-Raspberry-Pi/1553371_32760774493.html https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/New-Orange-Pi-Zero-...) Related, the lowRisc RISC-V project has a concept of minion cores: http://www.lowrisc.org/docs/memo-2014-001-tagged-memory-and-minion-cores/ http://www.lowrisc.org/docs/memo-2014-001-tagged-memory-and-...

joezydeco 10y ago

The iMX7 is a low power single or dual A7 core with an extra Cortex-M4 core on the die for real-time applications. Looks like they also took out some of the multimedia blocks to try and get the price down compared to the iMX6. http://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers-and-processors/arm-processors/i.mx-applications-processors/i.mx-7-processors/i.mx-7solo-processors-heterogeneous-processing-with-arm-cortex-a7-and-cortex-m4-cores:i.MX7S http://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers-and-processors/...

monocasa 10y ago
NXP also nuked a lot of their free support from orbit when they bought Freescale. Doing stuff like deleting a bunch of the SD card images for their sabre boards. We were told by NXP that some Indian support firm still had them for like... a $20k support contract. They really pissed us off with that crap, and our shop at least probably won't be buying NXP parts for a while.
- joezydeco 10y ago
  Why couldn't you rebuild the SD image from Yocto?
  - kogepathic 10y ago
    > Why couldn't you rebuild the SD image from Yocto? Because the vendor should provide an SDK for development? It's fine if the vendor's image is based on Yocto, but you should still be able to download something from them with instructions.
    - joezydeco 10y ago
      Because the vendor should provide an SDK for development? That's literally what Yocto builds for you. you should still be able to download something from them with instructions. As an example, here's Freescale/NXP's github with their Yocto recipes. It was not "nuked from orbit" on the purchase. https://github.com/Freescale/fsl-community-bsp-platform https://github.com/Freescale/fsl-community-bsp-platform And a sample build guide: http://www.nxp.com/assets/documents/data/en/release-notes/IMX6L31428101RN.pdf?fsrch=1&sr=1&pageNum=1 http://www.nxp.com/assets/documents/data/en/release-notes/IM...