Olimex's Tukhla, Built Around the i.MX8QuadMax, Targets Open-Hardware Linux Power Users
Designed for power users, the Tukhla packs up to 16GB of RAM, HDMI in and out, and will be a truly open source design.
Bulgarian open-hardware specialist Olimex has revealed details of what it describes as its "most complex OSHW board yet:" an NXP iMX8QuadMax-based single-board computer dubbed the Tukhla.
"[A] company from EU which values the OSHW [Open Source Hardware] recognized the absence of high-end open source Linux board and asked us to design one," Olimex's Tsvetan Usunov explains. "They offered to cover all associated design costs. They specially requested this to be not yet another [Rockchip] RK3399 board, but based on SoC with proper documentation and software support. NXP’s high end iMX8QuadMax matched their requirements perfectly."
"Currently all powerful Cortex-A72 comes from Chinese or Korean origin and are always closed projects, the only published info in best case is PDF schematic which can’t be verified i.e. the final product may or may not match what they publish. The popular Raspberry Pi goes even further and their 'schematics' are just connector diagrams."
The Tukhla, by contrast, will be a fully open design, Usunov promises — built in the open source KiCad electronic design automation (EDA) package. Aside from the iMX8 SoC itself — which includes two Arm Cortex-A72 cores, four Cortex-A53 cores, two Cortex-M4F cores, and a quad-core graphics processor with 32 OpenGL ES 3.2 and Vulkan compatible compute units — the board will include up to 16GB of LPDDR4 memory, microSD support, eMMC and QSPI flash storage, a SATA connector, two single-lane PCI Express connectors with NVMe support, HDMI input and output, USB 2.0 OTG and USB 3.0 Host support, two gigabit Ethernet ports, and two MIPI CSI camera connectors.
The device won't, however, be cheap — even if you have the capability to make it yourself from the files Olimex will release. "The price of MIMX8QM5AVUFFAB alone is around €100 in small quantities and currently LPDDR4 4GB cost €35, LPDDR4 8GB cost €50, LPDDR4 16GB cost €80. So with BOM [Bill of Materials] over €200 [around $230] this board will not be affordable for the most of Raspberry Pi $35 price range users," Usunov notes.
"This board targets professionals, who need high performance board and being not dependent by Chinese SOC vendors. With all hardware open, which gives them security for their business as the design is public."
Usunov has predicted it could take six months or longer to finalize the Tukhla — "brick" in Bulgarian — board design, though promises it will then go on to form the basic building block of a range of new, open source hardware products.
In the meantime, more information is available on the Olimex blog where an initial set of schematics has been made available to download.