The Scottish Boinc Team

Posted: **Fri May 25, 2018 1:15 am**

Freescale Semiconductor, as Wikipedia has it, was an American multinational corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. Was, because it is now NXP Semiconductors. But as that name does not ring any bells yet, I will write this about the old name: Freescale. That is not the same 'free' as in 'free beer', as you will discover.

Though they produced various kinds of silicon chips, the ones we are interested in is the i.MX family. And it only really becomes interesting once they produce these as quad-cores, so if you will forgive me I wont even be writing about their mono and dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 based i.MX 7 series here, nope. We go straight to the quad models of the i.MX 6 series and later.

Freescale Semiconductor SOCs

	Type	Fab	CPU Speed	GPU	GPU Speed	GPU SDKs	Applications
i.MX6 Quad	Quad-core Cortex-A9	40 nm	1200 MHz	Vivante GC2000+ Vivante GC320+ Vivante GC355	594 MHz	OpenGL ES 3.1, OpenVG 1.1, OpenCL 1.2, Direct3D 11	CuBox-i4, HummingBoard-i4, Udoo-i4
i.MX6 QuadPlus	Quad-core Cortex-A9	40 nm	1200 MHz	Vivante GC2000+ Vivante GC320+ Vivante GC355	720 MHz	OpenGL ES 3.1, OpenVG 1.1, OpenCL 1.2, Direct3D 11
i.MX8 Quad	Quad-core Cortex-A53	28 nm	1500 MHz	Dual-core Vivante GC7000Lite/XSVX	-	OpenGL ES 3.1, OpenVG 1.1, OpenCL 1.2, Direct3D 11	CuBox Pulse, HummingBoard Pulse
i.MX8 QuadPlus	One Cortex-A72 + Quad-core Cortex-A53	28 nm	1200 MHz + 1800 MHz	Dual-core Vivante GC7000Lite/XSVX	-	OpenGL ES 3.1, OpenVG 1.1, OpenCL 1.2, Direct3D 11	-
i.MX8 QuadMax	Two Cortex-A72 + Quad-core Cortex-A53	28 nm	1200 MHz + 1800 MHz	Dual-core Vivante GC7000/XSVX	800 MHz	OpenGL ES 3.1, OpenVG 1.1, OpenCL 1.2, Direct3D 11	-

Somehow Freescale must have thought they'd struck gold with their SOCs, because they -and their resellers, e.g. SolidRun and Udoo- sold them at prices that put them almost out of business. It was economically far more interesting to invest in e.g. Intel Bay Trail or AMD Kabini -or later- SOCs, because the value for money on these was far higher -the costs were about the same, if not lower. And the AMD and Intel GPUs could be brought to use, BOINC-wise, as they were at least supported in BOINC with OpenCL capable drivers.

For those who do not believe a Freescale system is expensive:
compose your own HummingBoard Quad
Compose your own CuBox Quad
Buy a Udoo Quad

Posted: **Fri May 25, 2018 4:03 am**

All the ARM CPU manufacturers are going to have to produce/release 14 nm or less tech else it just won't have that power efficiency advantage to compete compared to the latest Intel CPUs.

Posted: **Fri May 25, 2018 8:05 am**

scole of TSBT wrote: ↑Fri May 25, 2018 4:03 amAll the ARM CPU manufacturers are going to have to produce/release 14 nm or less tech else it just won't have that power efficiency advantage to compete compared to the latest Intel CPUs.

I know of at least one company that will manufacture a 14 nm ARM SOC: The Intel Stratix-10, a Cortex-A53 that is made by Intel for Altera

Other examples of 14 nm ARM chips are the Exynos 8 Octa and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820
Next step has been set by Intel too: a 10 nm step
A 7 nm step by MediaTek is in the making (and it looks like the core wars are invading the ARM platform too)

The Scottish Boinc Team

Freescale Semiconductor SOCs

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