BeagleBoard-X15: new OSHW from BeagleBoard.org

David Scheltema (interested1 has written a great post about BeagleBoard-X15 on MAKE Blog

BeagleBoard Officially Reveals the X15 — And it’s a Beast

http://makezine.com/2015/10/14/beagleboard-officially-reveals-the-x15-and-its-a-beast/

Hi Drew,

Thanks for the links!

Really looking forward to this at Christmas (apart from Christmas itself, and Star Wars. Speaking of which, great that the BeagleBone color scheme is still black!).

This board looks like in reality it may have at least an order of magnitude greater realistically-usable performance than its predecessor, due to the addition of the multiple Cortex-M, DSP and GPU cores.

And love the high-speed interfaces that provide perhaps a hundred-fold increase in I/O throughput with GigEth and USB 3.0 on the board. So much to look forward to.

Here is a tidied-up diagram of the processor that we can use for blogs/annotations perhaps.

(It is the same as the one in the TRM, but removed of the color so we can highlight bits of it with the black-and-white one, since there will be a lot of topics to discuss, and the other

one with more color where orange is video related, red is processing power, etc).

I'll place colored and black-and-white PNG and SVG format files in the BeagleBone section tomorrow and on elinux.

I'll be interested to see how it performs compared to the US$74 ODROID-XU4, which has quad 2 GHz Cortex-A15 and quad 1.4 GHz Cortex-A7.  For real-time applications, the PRU, DSP, and Cortex-M4 are very attractive.

John Beetem makes a good point, we are seeing other processors that are multi-cored, and so I got curious about the secret sauce that holds everything together.

According to the TRM, there is a full-blown switching fabric type of interconnect (called L3 interconnect in there, but means 'level 3' not layer 3) from Arteris inside the chip (not used between the ARM Cortex-A cores, but between the different cores and other major subsystems). No idea on throughput capability, but given it is 128-bit wide and non-blocking according to a deepchip post it could be a spectacular amount of throughput between modules simultaneously. Some of the modules appear to have multiple 128-bit wide interconnects to the fabric. All the other peripherals are connected into this fabric at high speed from L4 (level 4, not layer 4) interconnect modules.

There is some cool functionality like the ability to have bandwidth regulation, priorities and some security features.

It will take some study though - 260 pages of documentation on the interconnect alone!

shabaz wrote:

 

No idea on throughput capability, but given it is 128-bit wide and non-blocking according to a deepchip post it could be a spectacular amount of throughput between modules simultaneously. Some of the modules appear to have multiple 128-bit wide interconnects to the fabric. All the other peripherals are connected into this fabric at high speed from L4 (level 4, not layer 4) interconnect modules.

There is some cool functionality like the ability to have bandwidth regulation, priorities and some security features.

Obviously not cool in the thermal sense, given the heat sink   OTOH, I did amuse Gerald Coley by sticking a heat sink on my original BeagleBoard B4.

New links from today:

BeagleBoard-X15 mailing list

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/beagleboard-x15

BeagleBoard-X15 design files

https://github.com/beagleboard/beagleboard-x15

Yeah, I think there are other boards that provide a better value in terms of application processor performance to run Linux.  I agree the combination of all those on-die processors will make X15 appealing for real-time systems.

This discussion also came up on the beagleboard mailing list:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/beagleboard/_PfeLrGSEKI

I had asked if people knew of other suppliers that include a microcontroller on-die with a Cortex-A series processor.  One person pointed out the Xilinix Zynq combines a "hard" Cortex-A processor with a FPGA.  Someone else wrote that the Freescale i.MX6 is going to have a Cortex-M4 on-die.

For more see Beagleboard:BeagleBoard-X15 - eLinux.org . Nice pictures of layout near middle of page.

Clem

The UDOO Neo uses an i.MX 6SoloX processor that has a 1 GHz Cortex A9 and a 200 MHz Cortex M4 core in it.  It has dual row Arduino compatible (3.3V I/0) connectors

with software that dedicates one row of those pins to the M4 core with the other row of pins dedicated to the A9 core. It also has a Arduino compatible IDE for the M4 core

with the A9 running Linux of course.

It looks like an interesting motherboard.  The eSATA connector and GHz Ethernet capability is definitely welcome for high-speed local storage and networking respectively.

I have to agree with johnbeetem that at USD 239.00, this seems to be a high price tag considering the competition in desktop and server motherboard markets.  Also:

• At 4" x 4.2" (unique form factor), there is no existing off-the-shelf protective enclosure available.  Their customer base probably can eventually produce 3D-print STL files for enclosures.
• Cooling heat-sinks and fans should be an interesting adventure too.  Again, the customer base should rise to the occasion, given the investment.
• For RAM, you get exactly 2GB DDR3L at 533 MHz (~8,500 MB/sec max).  "Beast"?  Most moderately-priced DDR3/3L packages sold nowadays are DDR3-1333 (10,666 MB/sec max) or DDR3-1600 (12,800 MB/sec max).
• Why should a customer incur the cost of a second 1GHz RJ-45 connector?  Maybe, they are thinking about network infrastructure applications where physical separation on this board is desirable (E.g. router or proxy)?

clem57 - if you buy one of these, I would love to come over and see it!  Any other perspective buyers live in the DFW Texas area?