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Comment by meuk | Hacker News Reader

The i.MX6 CPU is, by the way, the CPU that is used in the opensource Novena laptop. Apparently it is a reasonably powerful processor, but more importantly, it doesn't require an NDA to access the datasheet.

I am not sure how things will be for the i.MX8, but I certainly hope that they will continue this practice.

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https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/reference-manual/IMX8MDQLQRM.pdf

Seems like it is available

Nice, I actually looked for it in December but it wasn't there yet. Looks like I just missed the boat.

There are no datasheets for the Vivante GPU that NXP integrate as a silicon blob.

Anyone able to comment on how Spectre is being addressed for this processor and/or even in general by its manufacturer?

https://community.nxp.com/thread/467234 (2018-01-11) basically says NXP will work with customers privately and end users should contact their OEMs.

https://puri.sm/posts/purism-patches-meltdown-and-spectre-va... appears to only cover Intel CPUs.

i.MX6 uses Cortex-A9 cores so is affected by spectre. ARM has some good info on how to deal with it: https://developer.arm.com/support/security-update

i.MX8M will use Cortex-A53 cores so is not affected by spectre.

EDIT: Clarified that i.MX8M only has Cortex-A53 cores. Some i.MX8 parts will have Cortex-A72 cores which are affected by spectre. i.MX8M is the version discussed by Purism's post.

Thanks much for investing the time to carefully reply!

Unfortunately NXP nuked a lot of the free support from orbit when they acquired Freescale.

Even stuff like sd card images for their dev board disappeared off their site more or less immediately after the acquisition.

Isnt the i.MX6 CPU comparable to the CPU in a Samsung Galaxy SIII phone?

I consider it to be slow and outdated.

Not sure why this is being downvoted. I'm afraid you're right that many commercial, closed-source CPU's are faster, but (depending on your application) it's not that bad. CPU's in smartphones are ridiculously overpowered for 95% of the uses cases anyway. Anyway, it's the best 'open' (then documentation is openly available; the CPU is not open source!) processor available, AFAIK.

It all depends on what software you run under it, certainly Java does not help in this context. A few days ago I had Debian+lxde running on one of those very small chinese mini netbooks; I can't check now what's the CPU, but it's a 300 MHz one with only 128MB RAM, and the system boots from the SD card (the laptop comes with Win CE). I wouldn't call it snappy for sure, but it's useable.

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