About time
We've heard surprisingly little from Freescale, considering its strong heritage in embedded chips and general move in that direction by the tech industry. But yesterday Freescale announced its new family of application processors, which offer up to five times the performance of its current generation.
The i.MX 6 series is based around ARM's Cortex A9 core design, which means it's scalable to four CPU cores, each of which can clock up to 1.2 GHz. There's also bullish talk of top graphics, but no talk of Imagination Technologies' PowerVR designs, so we must assume this is Freescale's own graphics designs, which may or may not measure up to the best Imagination, Qualcomm and NVIDIA have to offer.
"Our i.MX 6 series offers consumers the novel and uncompromised online experiences they demand from next-generation connected consumer electronic products," said Bernd Lienhard, VP and GM of Freescale's multimedia applications division. "Low power, cost efficiency, enormous processing headroom and unmatched compatibility are at the heart of the i.MX 6 series."
"With the i.MX 6 series, Freescale offers the broadest and highest performance family of products based on ARM Cortex-A9 technology of any vendor in the mobile processor segment," said Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at In-Stat.
We're not aware of any smartphones running Freescale SoCs, but apparently it's the market share leader in e-readers. The company also has a strong focus on ‘automotive infotainment' devices, but don't hold your breath for devices running on this platform, as Freescale has only committed to start sampling to customers sometime this year.
