 Hi, I'm M.P.I. All right, I'm M.P.I. Every single week. Did you tune in for Brigitte this week? It is from... XMOS. I don't think we've covered XMOS before, so I'm kind of excited. No, we have not. Yeah, no. I like to always check out some companies that we haven't before. I've seen XMOS stuff for a bit, and they've been very popular on social media. But I've never actually, like, investigated their chips. And so I was like, hey, this is a good excuse. So this week's I'm M.P.I. It's an available board, but really it's the X2 316 series, which is their latest Core.AI, their XCore.AI model of chips. It comes available on BGA and also this QFN, which looks like it has some pretty sweet ground and power planes on the bottom. I like that they make that chips that are available on QFN for manufacturability. It kind of seems like everything these days is BGA. Okay, so the XCore is not an ARM Cortex, right? Which is, you know, we covered a couple of what is called, like, crossover microcontrollers, ultra-powerful microcontrollers from NXP, the IMX series a couple of weeks ago. These are also what we call crossover, but they're not Cortex series. Instead, it's XCore. It's their own Core chipset. And you see there's basically, it's kind of like two processors, but it's like two multi-core processors. So there's two tiles, what they call, and each tile, and maybe you can make this bigger so you can see the text. Yeah, I can do that. I just need a second here to scale it up. Oh, no, just the window bigger. Oh, you wanted to see, oh, you didn't want the, you just wanted this. Yes, thank you because I wanted to read all the details. Okay, so in each tile left and right, they've got the ALU and they also have their own internal 512 kilobytes of SRAM. And then there's like this communication, the switch and like packet messaging system in between. And each one has five to eight cores. So you'll see, like, when we go through the list of processors, some of like, some are like 2,300 mps and some are like 3,500 mps. That basically depends on how many cores they've got. Each has 500 megahertz clock rate. And then, of course, they've got peripherals. And they also have their own IO banks. So you'll see at the top, the IO pins are per core. So you can actually have both cores at the same time doing IO control without interfering with each other, which is a common thing when you've got like a mic control and dual core. Often the IO pins are on a shared bus. And so you can't have both cores messing with the IO at the same time. You're at, you know, go to town. What you're getting is, you know, 10 to 16 cores, all clocked really fast. And this is like a super, super powerful chip. It reminds you, you know, it's not at all related to, but it kind of is evocative to me of this, like a super ultra powered propeller chip for folks who remember that custom chip from Parallax also had, you know, eight cores, special GPIO functions and was, you know, a non-arm cortex chip. But got to give them credit because they wanted to do a chip that was really good at audio processing. It was kind of like the combination of a very powerful mic controller, multi-core, lots of IO capabilities, DSP, and now they've added some AI acceleration as well. So basically it's just really, really, really fast, but it's a microcontroller. You have a free RTOS running on it, but you're not dealing with Linux. You're not dealing with QNX or whatever. No, no operating system that takes time to boot. It's instantaneous, which means it's great for appliances, devices, cars, etc. And not only is it really good audio, it's also got pretty good video and camera interface as well. And you can also attach external RAM if you want even more processing capability like you want more space to move in. Flash isn't built-in, you attach flash with, like, you spy flash or something similar, but basically very, very fast and here's just like another. This one I liked because it showed that, you know, the 512 kilobytes of RAM. The MIPI is interesting. Two lanes so you can do camera in or display out. Both are supported. Actually, on the dev board, you'll see there's a 15-pin, like Raspberry Pi compatible camera interface. High-speed USB-fi, so you can do host or peripheral. And then in the middle is that, you know, packet switching circuit interface. You can send data back and forth. And yeah, you can have external memory as well, LPDDR RAM. And there's ones with tons of pins. So, you know, you can connect a fairly big package of memory. Next up for the processor itself comes either 60-pin QFN. Again, manufacturable. There's also a chunky BGA, but with a 0.8-millimeter pitch. So, you know, not too bad to manufacture. They've got an interesting TensorFlow Lite from Microcontroller, but they've kind of got like a workflow setup where you can train your TensorFlow models in Lite, you know, the Python API, and then convert it into TensorFlow Micro one-time using their, like, online tools. So, you know, optimize TensorFlow Lite from Microcontroller that you actually do need to have a fairly good processor. I feel like, you know, eight cores running 500 megahertz, you have a chance of it. I'm actually kind of surprised they couldn't run TensorFlow Lite directly since you can run it on, you know, single board computers that are about the same MIPS capability. But instead of, you know, most chips where you, you know, you'd probably have a microcontroller, maybe a separate DSP or you'd have to really fine-tune everything, you just get, like, very, very high performance. And, you know, this is kind of their money-shot graph where they're like, hey, you know, if you have ARM Cortex M7 running at 600 megahertz, look, we have so many more cores and we're so much more optimized. You don't mention what this mystery ARM Cortex M7 at 600 megahertz is, but I'm betting it's probably the STM32H7 or F7, which is good because a lot of people like to use that chip. That's kind of the highest end microcontroller you can get these days, but they've been hard to get because of the chip shortage. And also I love competition. I want to have more chips of that power capability available to people. So, you know, we're not just only buying one chip, we have multiple options. So I'm very psyched to see more pressure at the high end of microcontrollers bringing that price down. And you'll see that the price here is very comparable. Lots of different options for this chip fam. Like I said, different, you know, 2400 or 3200 MIPS. I guess, you know, they all have the same logical cores, maybe somewhere clocked faster. IEA voltage can vary. That's one thing I noticed, 1.8 or 3.3 volts. They all have the same amount of RAM. They all have the same number of cores. Different number of IO based on whether you have the 60-pin QFN or the 265-pin FPGA. Some do and do not have the external memory and MIPI capability, which makes sense if you're doing graphical display stuff with a nice MIPI display that maybe is 1024 by 720 or something, you'll probably want the external memory to do the frame buffer. And of course, the key is a supplier. They also have some very cute dev boards. This is one for the X-core AI series. You know, pretty simple, just has the camera connector, which again looks suspiciously like the Raspberry Pi camera. Wi-Fi, native USB, debug USB, and of course audio because they're very specialized audio. You can see on the left, there's the left and the right, there's the GPIO banks. Probably the left-hand side is one core and the right-hand side is the other core. This is the dev board that is actually featured for the X-U316 series. And you can tell that it's like, hey, are you designing some sort of like DJ mixer or synthesizer or something, which this would be a really good job for. Got two MIDI interfaces. I've rarely seen devices that have too many, two RCA. Eight IO, sorry, analog outputs, line outputs. Peru looks like four different, four or yeah, four different on the right, I2S, ADC DAC combos. I think it's the TI-TVP series. Power supply on the bottom, USB external power, all that good stuff. But you know, one thing I think that they're definitely going after is the family of like, since DJ equipment, smart speakers, they've already kind of gone after that market a lot. I think also control panels for home devices or for automotive or industrial equipment where you have a noisy background and maybe you want to have speech recognition or you want to do stereo control. Yeah, what's that right there? That's clock in. I think that is if you want to, usually you have a crystal for clocking the chip, but I mean this, they don't really brag about the power, low power usage because it's got like 16 cores in it. So you know, probably you want to mess with your clock frequency to see if you tweak your power usage or maybe for precision, you have to have a good steady clock if you want to have your audio coming out at exactly 44 point, not one kilohertz. That's a, yeah, go sync signal. You can download the schematics for their explorer board which I found kind of handy because it kind of shows you all the capabilities again, lots of audio functionality and also how they split up the power supply just again have a pretty beefy power supply needed for these chips. Software tools are available. It's basically they say use free RTOS. Everything is running under free RTOS. You do need their compiler because it's not on Cortex you're not going to use ARM GCC but they have tool chains available for Windows, Mac and Linux. And they've got on GitHub a lot of their libraries. This is just a couple of their libraries. They have like, you know, 76 of them. They have a library for everything that you can do with their chipsets. I looked at some of the code. All of it looked like I had lots of good example code. You know, one of their things is clearly they're trying to make it very easy for people to transition from using ARM Cortex to using their chips. So they have to go a little bit above and beyond with their SDK offerings. And one thing I thought was cool is like, oh, you know, it's USB. And I bet they saw something T USB and wonder why I see T USB. I'm like, oh, I bet they use T USB. And they do. And I would like to point out how cool it is that the T USB stack is licensed so freely that Silicon vendors are now using T USB and they're adding support for their chipsets because we do not restrict who gets to use T USB. So good. Even the big ins use it. Yes. So very neat. You know, it's, again, it's a transition because a lot of people using these kind of high-end chipsets, they tend to be using ARM Cortex. But I think the power and functionality, which, you know, you're not going to get with ARM because usually when you see multi-core ARM, it's usually like one big processor and another small processor. Maybe it's a licensed thing. I don't know. You know, X-Core owns their own IP for the Silicon so they want to toss 16 cores in there and go for it. Available on Digi-Key. And totally in stock. Yeah. And you can see the pricing. It's really quite reasonable considering that you get the RAM built in. You don't have to add external RAM. It's almost completely fully built. You don't really need a lot of accessories. You need a crystal and maybe some Q-Spy memory and you're good to go. Lots of peripherals. Lots of functionality. Maybe good for your next audio project. I did notice when I Googled around for this part, a lot of audiophile DACs, like stereo drivers, use the X-Mars series. All right, we're going to play a video and then we'll see you on the other side for new products. Voice and Rich's experience. On the right, Zoom Center screen. We're being pushed back. Game, find more players. Here are the other players online. I need them, that we need some help. Now we're talking. Level smashed. Game pause. 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