G’day,
I’m currently prototyping an embedded product with a Raspberry Pi 2. The plan is to prove the software is capable of running on the RPi2, to help gauge the hardware requirements (in terms of performance) for the production Toradex Computer on Module.
As a starting point, can anyone suggest which of the iMX6 CoMs are similar to the RPi2 in terms of computing performance? I’d rather not buy the Apalis Quad 2GB if all I need is a Colibri DualLite 512MB for example.
Thanks!
This is a question which cannot be easily answered as performance is a very use-case specific thing. It heavily depends on what exactly you are doing and therefore in which areas you need the performance.
Just looking at the specifications, Raspberry Pi 2, it is a 900MHz quad core Cortex-A7 CPU with 1GB of RAM. If you are at the edge on the computing performance with your application on the RasPi2, then you might have to go with one of the quad-core solutions, e.g. Apalis iMX6Q 2GB. But it’s very hard to say. If you don’t have heavy graphics, the Colibri iMX7D 1GB might be a good option. It’s a dual core Cortex-A7 1GHz with 1GB or RAM but without GPU. The graphics therefore is also done with the normal cores. So it’s very hard to say. I guess it’s up to you to figure out where your application/use-case uses the most performance and then try to guess which of our modules fits the best. I assume you saw our product selector which helps finding the right product depending on specification filters:
Let us know if you have any further questions, or more specific input about your use-case.
Thanks for your response as always! I managed to finally get the cross-compiled application running on the RPi2 last night, which showed around ~50% CPU usage under full load. The application makes heavy use of Qt Quick/QML, so graphics performance is definitely a consideration.
I have been through the product selector, and will continue to review as the software evolves. I may end up buying a couple of different CoMs and seeing how they run.
You are very welcome! If your plan is to continue developing your application and have a bit of headroom for further improvements which could need more performance, you might already be in the Apalis family range of performance. However, we also have a Colibri T20 and especially T30 which would probably have enough performance, but they are based on Nvidia’s L4T which uses older kernels for T20/T30. If this isn’t an issue for you, it might be a good approach. We are also working a new module in the Colibri form factor, the Colibri iMX8X. This module will easily be able to provide the performance you need, but the availability is still many months away:
Thanks for the heads up, I wasn’t across that new iMX8X platform. The specs on paper certainly look very impressive! I’m not sure just yet what timeframe I’m working with, so that may actually become a possibility if my prototyping extends that far.
