| I know Bunnie as an incredible hardware engineer with a lot of experience across the entire process of getting a product from design to manufacture. I'm sure the decisions were made for very good reason. Freescale has extensive open source board support packages for several flavors of Linux and Android. With the exception of the TI's OMAP5, all of the A15 implementations I know of are under lock and NDA and even though Bunnie could source them, the documentation and software support packages would not be as easy and would require working closely with the manufacture to get them. I have no idea about OMAP5 as I haven't even seen one in production. Most mobile ARM processors AFAIK do not support gigabit ethernet yet, save a few Marvell SoCs (less for mobile and more for other embedded). Smartphones designed with modern ARM processors require teams of 2 dozen engineers working their asses off for months to make a single revision, and this is when they're partners with the chip manufacturers (ala Google, Apple, or Samsung). Bunnie is working with a much smaller team and with different constraints. Any board like this is going to be expensive to manufacture and assemble. Even if he were to do a run of 100 units at a time, the overhead of assembly and part purchases in such low quantities are likely to run $100+ a unit. Combine with the extra support costs of including an FPGA in there, and it's not unreasonable to charge so much for such a niche, low quantity product. Edit: Also Freescale is on the low end of the high end ARM market and they know it. I wouldn't be surprise if Bunnie got some extra help from them during integration. |
I've always been happy with the amount of support Freescale puts behind their processors. You don't realize how bad it is with some manufacturers until you're halfway through a project and things just fall apart.
And the i.MX6Q is a snappy little processor for the price.