Compute module alternatives or purchasable ARM chips?

[loki42]

I'm looking for something like the RPi CM4. However they have absolutely no availability and I'd be scared about them having none in the future if they do become available.  What other options do I have at similar price and performance?

Processor Type:   ARM Cortex A72 or faster.  1 gb RAM, 9 W power budget,  price around $50 for SOM. Quantity 500-1000 to start with. Need something faster than an A53.

Do any of the tablet / chrome book ARM makers let you buy the chips in smaller quantities? 1 reel...

[SMTech]

Commercial users can get Pi's that you might never see as "in stock", the system works although we haven't tried it in that volume... . The supply issues for Pi's are the same as for the alternatives, and they should be easing. As you've probably noticed there are lots of alternatives that are stocked quite well, but none of them offer the raw compute you are after, often they do beat a Pi in one chosen metric such as connectivity or hardware decoding. The powerful alternatives are just as hard to buy, expensive and don't have those organised commercial channels that exist for the Pi.

If you have the requisite skills and time to design your own, then if you found a chip you thought looked viable you should be able to talk to the manufacturer or reginal disti about your plans and get a sensible price, I don't think this is any less risky than choosing a Pi CM4 tho'. Certainly they are quite happy to sell in pretty much any qty and depending on how exciting your project sounds, might have other help to offer.

[loki42]

A few vendors seem to have Qualcomm and Rockchip stuff. I can find a lot of A53 parts cheap but i hope something that's not 10 years old might be available. There's a Rockchip RK3566 with A55 cores which might be quick enough.

As far as chip are you suggesting I should just pester Qualcomm / MediaTek / Amlogic etc? Are they actually interested in smaller orders? I've designed MIPI stuff before but never DDR4 so I think the routing will be a lot more scary.

The low end Intel stuff looks like amazing value. They are $15 and seem to have pretty amazing performance. I'm not sure how hard routing a board for them is though, docs etc.

[SMTech]

A few vendors seem to have Qualcomm and Rockchip stuff. I can find a lot of A53 parts cheap but i hope something that's not 10 years old might be available. There's a Rockchip RK3566 with A55 cores which might be quick enough.

As far as chip are you suggesting I should just pester Qualcomm / MediaTek / Amlogic etc? Are they actually interested in smaller orders? I've designed MIPI stuff before but never DDR4 so I think the routing will be a lot more scary.

The low end Intel stuff looks like amazing value. They are $15 and seem to have pretty amazing performance. I'm not sure how hard routing a board for them is though, docs etc.

First port of call your sales person, or relevant technical specialist for the reseller, you shouldn't need to be buying 10k or whatever of these to get them interested in coming to see you, 500 of these is still quite an expensive order line and certainly tasty enough if it repeats, they may then make the introduction to someone @ Qualcomm/Rockchip etc. We've had this for something as dull as a relay before ... It is almost certainly harder to deal with some of those people directly, but every manufacturer interfaces with the end user differently.

I'm not a layout person, but if you had something that did PoP memory that would solve that routing issue.

As well as the (premature??) reassurances of Pi availability in the press from Eben, we have heard reassuring stock talk via lets say "other channels" , I genuinely think its about to get much better.

[asmi]

As far as chip are you suggesting I should just pester Qualcomm / MediaTek / Amlogic etc? Are they actually interested in smaller orders? I've designed MIPI stuff before but never DDR4 so I think the routing will be a lot more scary.

No need to be scared. Most morern SoCs come with reference designs for memory interfaces which you can simply replicate in your designs. Infact, I heard some vendors will not provide support for you if you don't follow their reference designs.
Take a look at NXP i.MX 8QuadPlus/QuadMax. These seems like monster SoCs with array of various cores, so maybe one of them will suit you.

The low end Intel stuff looks like amazing value. They are $15 and seem to have pretty amazing performance. I'm not sure how hard routing a board for them is though, docs etc.

Your company will need to execute a corporate NDA with Intel, that will give you access to their development portal with all kinds of resources, including reference HW designs and code examples for pretty much everything they make - from 5W super-lowend embedded SoCs all the way to latest and greatest Xeons.

[nctnico]

As far as chip are you suggesting I should just pester Qualcomm / MediaTek / Amlogic etc? Are they actually interested in smaller orders? I've designed MIPI stuff before but never DDR4 so I think the routing will be a lot more scary.

No need to be scared. Most morern SoCs come with reference designs for memory interfaces which you can simply replicate in your designs. Infact, I heard some vendors will not provide support for you if you don't follow their reference designs.
Take a look at NXP i.MX 8QuadPlus/QuadMax. These seems like monster SoCs with array of various cores, so maybe one of them will suit you.

I agree. If you are in low volume products then you go for a SoC from NXP or TI if you want to have decent support for bootloader, memory interface design and the Linux kernel. AFAIK NXP has the most options including 3D GPU support compared to TI. Otherwise take a gamble with Allwinner or Rockchip. If you don't care about long-term availability & price so much but want more processing power then the modules from NVidia can be an interesting option but be prepared having to figure things out using a minimal amount of information. Support from NVidia is decent though; they'll fix kernel issues if you happen to stumble upon a bug that is in their kernel drivers.

[loki42]

Does TI / NXP or nvidia have anything in the price / performance budget?  Their range of A72 or faster under USD$50 seems limited.

"Processor Type:   ARM Cortex A72 or faster.  1 gb RAM, 9 W power budget,  price around $50 for SOM. Quantity 500-1000 to start with. Need something faster than an A53."

[asmi]

Does TI / NXP or nvidia have anything in the price / performance budget?  Their range of A72 or faster under USD$50 seems limited.

"Processor Type:   ARM Cortex A72 or faster.  1 gb RAM, 9 W power budget,  price around $50 for SOM. Quantity 500-1000 to start with. Need something faster than an A53."

Just looked at prices on DK for those MIMX8Q's and it looks like "$50 for SOM" isn't gonna happen. Just SoC start at $65/qty 90, which means direct prices are going to be around $45-50 just for the main chip.

[loki42]

Yeah that's why I was looking at qualcomm, amlogic, Intel etc as they've actually got lots of options at that price.  They NXP / TI is maybe easy to use but way more expensive.

[Styno]

The CNX software blog often lists modules with MCU, flash and ram from China mfg's and of course there are the more mainstream industrial players like Advantech, Variscite, Solidrun, Technexion et.al. that have SOM's in various formats.

[asmi]

Yeah that's why I was looking at qualcomm, amlogic, Intel etc as they've actually got lots of options at that price.  They NXP / TI is maybe easy to use but way more expensive.

I think of those Intel is the most realistic option, see if you can do what it takes to get access to their reference designs and stuff. Their chips at least can be bought on the open market.

[sam512bb]

I think of those Intel is the most realistic option, see if you can do what it takes to get access to their reference designs and stuff. Their chips at least can be bought on the open market.

Good day,

I would be cautious of selecting Intel or TI, as both of those companies have a long history of punting devices that do not meet their sale targets.  I have been burnt one too many times by both companies and so I rarely design in either firm's processors.  If anything I would check with the appropriate distributors to see which parts or variants have the largest sales volumes and see if these match your needs.  That said, I guess future availability concerns depend upon your product's expected lifetime along with customer support commitments.

Cheers,

Sam

[Kjelt]

RPi4 is a closed system but will become available again around august/september:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/05/raspberry_pi_shipments_rise/

[loki42]

I think of those Intel is the most realistic option, see if you can do what it takes to get access to their reference designs and stuff. Their chips at least can be bought on the open market.

Good day,

I would be cautious of selecting Intel or TI, as both of those companies have a long history of punting devices that do not meet their sale targets.  I have been burnt one too many times by both companies and so I rarely design in either firm's processors.  If anything I would check with the appropriate distributors to see which parts or variants have the largest sales volumes and see if these match your needs.  That said, I guess future availability concerns depend upon your product's expected lifetime along with customer support commitments.

Cheers,

Sam

Who would you recommend instead?  Qualcomm?  They've got some chips that at least have visible supply and price.

[loki42]

The Intel compute elements look very interesting form factor and availability wise but they are around $115 usd... a lot of the industrial style soms are very pricey.  Chrome book chips look a lot not sensible of I can get them. 

[sam512bb]

Who would you recommend instead?  Qualcomm?  They've got some chips that at least have visible supply and price.

Good day,

In the vast majority of my designs I use NXP (Freescale/Motorola), as their pricing, long term availability, and support has been excellent... and noteworthy because I am a low volume customer.  Online NXP pricing can be completely out to lunch (much higher than reality) and so I would recommend you connect with your local distributor/rep for accurate pricing and leadtimes.  Speaking of leadtimes... again... I continue to have excellent availability.  For example I received my parts (low volume - single tray orders) in about 1/4 the time or faster than published lead times.  In the past when there were supply issues Freescale were able to find enough parts for me to complete my build quickly.

As for what parts I can recommend... sadly, I cannot, as this is very design specific along with possible manufacturing constraints and of course pricing.  In my case I am not overly price sensitive, as long term availability and reliability are worth more than $ savings.    The older iMX6Q parts tend to be easier to get, but are somewhat long in the tooth.  I have been considering the iMX8 series, but these tend to not have the mix of features I typically require and include a number of other items that are not needed and so burden the overall design.  I have looked at some of TI's offerings, but past experiences with product discontinuance quickly crossed them off my list.  Other vendors from Asia were also reviewed, but because most of these are used in consumer products means their long term availability will be at the mercy of consumer's interests... which tend to fade after 18-24 months. 

In your case... if you need to meet a lower price point and have a limited availability need and/or can purchase enough inventory for your product lifetime, then I guess any vendor's product that meets your needs would be fine.

Cheers,

Sam

[JPortici]

In the vast majority of my designs I use NXP (Freescale/Motorola), as their pricing, long term availability, and support has been excellent... and noteworthy because I am a low volume customer.  Online NXP pricing can be completely out to lunch (much higher than reality) and so I would recommend you connect with your local distributor/rep for accurate pricing and leadtimes. 

Interesting to know. Because i have always put off using NXP as i always looked at online distributors. I didn't even think about contacting a sales rep for a few hundred MCUs a year (and usually we need to go with catalog prices because we have a production surge and buy whatever is available today, right now)

[Doctorandus_P]

You can try Olimex. Olimex has some special long term deal with Alwinner, and Olimex is big enough to buy enough chips so that Allwinner is willing to start up the factory to make a new batch of chips especially for Olimex. I think they have to buy 10.000 chips or so as a minimum order quantity for this deal. (Although at the moment both the A20 and A64 loose IC's seem to be "out of stock".

On the plus side,
Olimex has several different Linux boards and SOM modules, and in different configurations (inclusive industrial temperature range), and they have also made the complete KiCad projects of a lot of their boards available via gitlab, so it's quite easy to make a custom variant of them.

[loki42]

Olimex have great stuff but I need way more speed than anything they have in their som. The fastest stuff they have is A53 which I've already got. 

[loki42]

Got a meeting with AMD and Intel this week to chat about options. Haven't got a contact at Qualcomm though so chatting to the distributor about that.  Don't know who to chat to about amlogic or media tek. Anyone got advice on that?  I also have had some trouble finding benchmarks that compare single core floating point performance (only performance thing I care about) between different options especially comparing Celeron / pentium gold to big ARM core A7x families. 

[NorthGuy]

I also have had some trouble finding benchmarks that compare single core floating point performance (only performance thing I care about) between different options especially comparing Celeron / pentium gold to big ARM core A7x families.

The benchmark will not tell you how the CPU performs in your particular application. Create a small program which represents the operations you want to do and run it on several different CPUs. This will be your own benchmark. This will give you much more accurate estimate. But even then it also depends on many other things beyond CPU, such as memory.

The 64-bit mode (Aarch64) has SIMD registers for floating points. If you can use SIMD sensibly, it'll give you much better performance than scalar operations. A code which uses SIMD is likely to perform better on A53 than the scalar version of the same code on a similarly versed A72.

Also, you may consider an FPGA. It can do many operations in parallel and therefore will outperform CPU in doing floating operations. So, if you can port your algorithm to FPGA, you may be able to get your performance at lower price.

[loki42]

Cheap and FPGA isn't something I'd thought of together but there's obviously a point where it makes sense.  The algorithm is already heavily SIMD on the A53, but obviously getting examples of 10 different chips to run it will take a while so an approximate benchmark would help.  Should I expect any of the ARM chips to be faster in single core floating point performance vs low end x86 if neon and SSE are being used 64 bit OS?

[Smokey]

You can try Olimex. Olimex has some special long term deal with Alwinner, and Olimex is big enough to buy enough chips so that Allwinner is willing to start up the factory to make a new batch of chips especially for Olimex. I think they have to buy 10.000 chips or so as a minimum order quantity for this deal. (Although at the moment both the A20 and A64 loose IC's seem to be "out of stock".

On the plus side,
Olimex has several different Linux boards and SOM modules, and in different configurations (inclusive industrial temperature range), and they have also made the complete KiCad projects of a lot of their boards available via gitlab, so it's quite easy to make a custom variant of them.

Link: https://www.olimex.com/Products/SOM/

[loki42]

AMD xilinx meeting tuned out to be all them pushing FPGA chips which seem like they'll be pretty annoying to develop for. Couldn't get them to tell me about embedded ryzen. Intel has some decent options and has part volume available at sensible prices. 

[NorthGuy]

Cheap and FPGA isn't something I'd thought of together but there's obviously a point where it makes sense.  The algorithm is already heavily SIMD on the A53, but obviously getting examples of 10 different chips to run it will take a while so an approximate benchmark would help.  Should I expect any of the ARM chips to be faster in single core floating point performance vs low end x86 if neon and SSE are being used 64 bit OS?

I don't know. It's very difficult to predict performance of OOB CPUs. You don't need to buy 10 different chips. You can buy a few of what you feel are good candidates for you.

With FPGA, you don't need a physical part to estimate performance. The tools will tell you how fast your design works.

[loki42]

Qualcomm looks to be way cheaper and way faster than the other options but I'm still waiting to hear back about supply.  Otherwise Intel are pretty easy to deal with and single core floating performance is good.  I'll probably try prototypes with both.  Not having an example of total BOM cost for parts is very annoying.  I love the TI examples that tell you the total solution BOM cost in case the required power chip is $10...