Open hardware company Olimex has announced its developing a “high end open source Linux board” for a French company called Ignitial.

The upcoming Ignitial Tukhla will have an NXP iMX8 processor, support for up to 16GB of RAM, and plenty of options for storage, input, and output.

What makes it an open hardware project is that not only will it run free and open source software, but the hardware designs and schematics will be available.

It won’t be cheap though — the bill of materials is expected to be higher than 200 Euros ($227), so the finished product is likely to sell for more than that.

According to Olimex, the heart of the device will be a MIMX8QM5AVUFFAB processor, which is the most powerful chip in the iMX8 family. It features:

  • 2 x ARM Cortex-A72 CPU cores
  • 4 x ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores
  • 2 x ARM Cortex-M4F CPU cores
  • 4 x GPU cores

The board’s other features include support for up to 16GB of LPDDR4 memory, eMMC storage, a microSD card reader, and a SATA connector for external hard drives or SSDs as well as two single lane PCIe M.2 connectors for NVMe storage.

There will be HDMI 1.4 and HDMI 2.0 ports, USB 3.0 host and USB 2.0 OTG ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, and two MIPI CSI camera connectors.

Given the price, specs, and open hardware design, Olimex says this product won’t really be designed to have the broad appeal of something like the $35 Raspberry Pi mini computer. Instead it’s designed for “professionals, who need high performance board” based on open hardware, “which gives them security for their business as the design is public.”

It’s unlikely the board will be available for purchase this year. Olimex says it could take as long as “6 months or more” to finalize the designs and begin production of the Ignitial Tukhla.

via CNX Software

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3 replies on “Ignitial Tukhla will be a high-end, open hardware single board computer (developed by Olimex)”

  1. Where “Hi end” is defined as probably slower than a Raspberry Pi 4.

    1. Really? Does RPi 4 have SATA, M.2 storage interfaces? No, the best Rip offer is shared USB 3.0. That is a huge difference.

      How bad is RPi 4 GPU? Really bad.

      How open is system soft in Rip? Totally closed: RPi really is a low performance CPU with auxiliar ARM cores. That GPU starts system with totally closed SO, which is present all time and really controls your Rip. I.e. OS you start later on RPi doesn’t control your system: GPU OS controls Rip at a more priority level.

      RPi is very far from ideal for freedom in your system. For that reason for example Librem 5 and MNT Reform choose NXP i.MX8 SOCs: they are the more open and well supported modern Docs capable of running desktop Linux.

      Of course, you can go cheap, reject your freedom and go with Rip. Even you can forget real freedom and thinking you are free because you use open OS on hard you don’t have real control (like you do with modern x86 or RPi).

      1. Errata: Rip instead of Rip, “low performance CPU” instead of “low performance GPU”…

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