Olimex Unveils High-Performance NXP i.MX 8M Plus-Based System-on-Module Design
New board includes a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53, Cortex-M7, HiFi 4 DSP, and 2.3 TOPS neural processor, alongside 2D and 3D graphics cores.
Bulgarian open source specialist Olimex has showcased a new system-on-module (SOM) design, built around the NXP Semiconductors i.MX 8M Plus system-on-chip — offering a quad-core Arm processor and a 2.3 TOPS neural network accelerator coprocessor.
"[The] iMX8Quad Max board we developed is still waiting for components to verify the first prototypes," Olimex's Tsvetan Usunov writes by way of introduction to the new board, "but we decided to develop one more SOC from iMX8 Plus series which we thought is filling niche where we do not have product."
The i.MX 8M Plus chosen for the new system-on-module design includes some impressive specifications: A quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor running at 1.8GHz plus an Arm Cortex-M7 real-time coprocessor running at 800MHz and a Tensilica HiFi 4 digital signal processor (DSP) core sit alongside a neural network accelerator designed for edge AI work and offering a claimed 2.3 trillion operations per second (TOPS).
To this, Olimex has added 6GB of LPDDR4 memory, power management circuitry, an EEPROM for configuration, a status LED, LVDS and MIPI DSI connectors for displays, two MIPI CSI camera connectors compatible with the popular Raspberry Pi Camera Module family.
Six connectors on the board's underside break out the remaining features, including — but not limited to — PCI Express 3.0, two CAN FD buses, HDMI 2.0, S/PDIF, SAI, two USB 3.0 lanes, two gigabit Ethernet ports of which one supports Time Sensitive Networking (TSN), eMMC5.1 and SDIO 3.0, four UART, six I2C, and three SPI buses, plus JTAG for debugging.
"Evaluation board iMX8MPlus-SOM-EVB is now designed with Dual Ethernet, Dual USB 3.0, PCIe, HDMI," Usunov adds. "NXP is going to provide mainline Linux support for this SOC. It’s impossible to comment any pricing at the moment, but it will be very competitive compared with similar industrial grade products."
More details are available on the Olimex blog, though not yet with any launch information.