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STM32MP2: ST’s first Linux capable 64-bit MPU with NPU, GPU and TSN
- Havoc 3y agoWhat’s the software situation like with the NPUs like this? I know GPU->opencl->MLC is often feasible but never hear anything a out the NPU
- conradev 3y agoThe GPU also has Vulkan, which I believe has compute shaders I am similarly curious how the NPU works software-wise
- slau 3y agoThis was semi-discussed 4 days ago when someone posted the release announcement of the MP1, which is a few years old (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37218879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37218879). Someone pointed out the MP2 had been announced in the meantime. This announcement itself is from 2023-06-05, so not exactly hot off the presses either.
- unwind 3y agoSomeone here. Great to see this being more widely/deeply described. It looks very capable, interesting choice with onboard Ethernet switch. Would be so much fun as a games console, but I guess even at this size programming the GPU bare metal will not be very accessible.
- bri3d 3y agoI'd probably choose a much more compute/graphics focused SoC for a games console, like almost any smartphone SoC or even an APU. These STM32MP parts are designed for devices with realtime needs and real-world interface requirement, because they combine Application Processors that run Linux (albeit not quite as fast as a cutting-edge phone SoC) with a Cortex-M core made for realtime application use, as well as interface peripherals like CAN. Basically these are supposed to be a bridge between the "embedded" world and the "Linux" world.
- gsmecher 3y agoThe integrated Ethernet switch is only as useful as its software stack - I say this after an excruciating decade with TI's Sitara devices (and the built-in CPSW ethernet switch.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- _fizz_buzz_ 3y agoFunny that it's still called STM32 even though it's a 64bit chip. I suppose stm32 has become so much brand recognition.
- monocasa 3y agoIt still has a 32 bit M profile core for the real time stuff. It just also has a A profile core complex bolted to the side of it too.
- shrubble 3y ago' An OEM launch means that original equipment manufacturers are starting to get samples. Consequently, if all goes well, we expect general sampling to begin at the end of the year and mass production by the second quarter of 2024 for both devices and development boards.' So a year away before the first Pi-a-like or SBCs for hobbyists/hackers hit the market
- hunson_abadeer 3y agoHigh-performance STM32 chips have been in short supply since 2019, with backorder times in the range of years. There's a reason why you don't see a whole lot of hobby boards using them today. So, as a hobbyist, I wouldn't be getting my hopes up for 2024...
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>So, as a hobbyist, I wouldn't be getting my hopes up for 2024... Meh, if you're a hobbyist you can migrate to any other ARM board you can find on the cheap in your area. No need to pigeonhole yourself in the STM32 ecosystem.
- shrubble 3y agoI don't have any insider knowledge but supposedly supplies are easing now and be normal by 2024.
- lafar6503 3y agoLinux capable, but what about drivers for GPU and other peripherals?
- the__alchemist 3y agoTangent: Can you write bare-metal on these for real-time applications that need more power than traditional MCUs?
- flyingcircus3 3y agoEvery working microprocessor ever created can run bare metal code.
- mathisfun123 3y agoWhether it was clear to you or that OP specifically was asking about the GPU, you shouldn't be so confident in universals like this. In this case, it turns out to be basically false in that the driver for the GPU is closed source: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/512232/stm32mp157-gpu-documentation https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/512232/stm32...
- bullen 3y ago"however it mentions that it supports OpenGL ES 2.1 API" Without 3+ you miss out on VAO which IMO is the last GL feature.
- mikepavone 3y agoThere is an open source driver for Vivante GPUs, including the GC400 (or maybe GCNano? and the official docs are oddly vague on what GPU is used and 3rd party sources disagree) used in the STM32MP157: etnaviv. I can't seem to find anything on what's in the STM32MP2 though other than that it supports Vulkan though. Not sure why ST is so tight-lipped on what GPU IP they're using
- the__alchemist 3y ago
- amelius 3y agoBuilt to run an Open Source OS, but you still need their proprietary cruftware to program it.
- the__alchemist 3y agoWhat proprietary cruftware are you referring to? I've only used their Cortex-M devices. Is the register-level API too complicated on these?
- snvzz 3y agoWhat cruftware? STM32 will run your code right away after reset clears[0]. 0. https://github.com/cpq/bare-metal-programming-guide https://github.com/cpq/bare-metal-programming-guide
- synergy20 3y agohow is this different from TI's am3xx used in its beagle series boards? For me it's either RPi's CM4 or Beagle modules these days.
- AlotOfReading 3y agoAs far as I'm aware, only the AM6x will has support for TSN stuff, not the AM3x. Second, you don't have to deal with TI's crappy tooling or TI themselves. I vote against TI parts every chance I get because it's almost universally a mistake everyone comes to regret.
- synergy20 3y agoI used beaglebone(also i.mx6 from NXP, thinking about using CM4 for next projects) to make products and they're robust to me, what's the real problem with TI? admittedly I have not used beagle boards to make products in the past few years but the past experience was good, is it because its software are now out of date and unmaintained?
- AlotOfReading 3y agoTI processors tend to have weird misbehaviors and the support is far worse than competitors like NXP. Plus, their driver quality is usually low, and actually using driver or bsp code is difficult in a consistent, automatic way. You want to regularly upgrade drivers/bsps that you're carrying a couple dozen unofficial patches on top of. The tooling available forces you to do that semi-manually, which also means people make mistakes and introduce unnecessary regressions. Even when their stuff works, I've had too many instances where the support resolution was "ensure you're doing everything in this 1,500 item checklist" (not exaggerating).
- synergy20 3y agovery helpful, I probably will stick with NXP chips then(its software seems updated fairly often and its chips are usually solid) instead of TI's, after all TI pretty much left the ARM chip space comparing to other larger ARM chip vendors. For NXP's imx6/7/8 I wish there were similar open source communities as RPi and Beagle board have, there are a few commercial i.mx vendors but not a well known open one for NXP, which is unfortunate.
- snvzz 3y ago>Thinking about computing architectures 10 years into the future No, they aren't. Otherwise, they would have selected RISC-V ISA, rather than a legacy ISA. I am sad to see a microcontroller family I favored sabotage itself into irrelevance like this.
- baybal2 3y ago[dead]
- mhh__ 3y agoIt doesn't matter at all
- kragen 3y agoi'm not convinced this matters very much the great advantage of risc-v is that you don't need to pay arm a license for every chip, but i think that's like 99¢ or something, which is too small to matter at the price point they're likely targeting risc-v is better in many ways; the virtual memory architecture is much cleaner, you don't need a mode bit to switch between compressed and uncompressed instructions (which avoids all kinds of minor complications), the compressed instruction set is enormously simpler, conditional branches are usually one instruction instead of two because you don't have condition codes, and if you implement it in the same process as a similar-performance arm it uses less area and less power it's worse in others; you don't have addressing modes with bit shifts, you don't have base+offset two-register addressing, there's no bitfield extraction instructions, you can't run rv32 code on an rv64 chip, and the compilers aren't as good. all of this means lower coremarks or dmips per mhz in an in-order chip and more verbose disassembly, but a lot of it can be fixed with instruction-set extensions, which are enormously easier in risc-v land (ldm/stm and conditional execution is maybe a wash; they're pretty convenient for assembly, but they complicate things like exception handling, context switching, debuggers, and memory-mapped I/O, and to a great extent you can paper over the lack of them with millicode and/or macro assemblers) but it's pretty rare that issues like these are the deciding factor in whether a product is successful. i mean we have compilers and dynamic binary translation so generally switching between instruction sets is not that hard gigadevice's risc-v clones of popular stm32s, the gd32vf line, seem to have failed despite lower power usage. gigadevice's arm clones of the same chips (gd32f) are enormously successful
- user_7832 3y agoI’m curious if any hardware dev can chime in on this - would it be possible to use such an chip with an RTOS? I’ve seen rtos’es which run on esp32 style mmu-less chips, and it seems that anything with an a core runs an (non-real-time) OS. But could the A chip in this be used to run an RTOS without a host system, for repeatability and real-time operation?
- jpcfl 3y agoYes.
- 5436436347 3y agoThere are a number of RTOS’s out there now, both proprietary (e.g. VxWorks) and OSS (Zephyr) that support A-series chips with an MMU, and can operate with a single (kernel) context. They still provide bounded latencies compared to full-fat OS’s, but don’t have as much determinism as microcontrollers without page tables and caches. The cores themselves (maybe not the A35?) don’t generally work without the MMU enabled, because most ARM cores also disable the cache if the MMU is off.
- user_7832 3y agoThank your for your reply! I didn’t realise that Zephyr supports A series chips already.
- kragen 3y agofor those who want to read this page, it may be useful to know that the firefox readability button bypasses the cookie consent extortion popup
- chiph 3y agoDoes it have HDMI support? I have a spare small 1080P monitor and was thinking about creating a dashboard. Or weather station, or photo frame... A Raspberry Pi would be overkill, and their availability is still iffy.
- aftbit 3y agoWell this thing is less available and will have less ecosystem support. Get a Raspberry Pi Zero W if you want something with a visual component and want to save some cash.