YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Playing with the STM32MP2

25 points dverlaeckt80 4 hours ago 13 comments

ranger_danger 1 hour ago | parent

> And a lot of these parts either don’t have crypto acceleration or security-by-obscurity lock up the docs to the crypto accelerator, which is an absolute dealbreaker for me.

I have to wonder if locking up the docs is some kind of export control or government contract requirement.

throwaway81523 1 hour ago | parent

Despite STM32 in the product name, this is a dual core Cortex-A35 SOC intended to run Linux, though he brings it up as bare metal. The STM32MP257F-EV1 dev board that he used costs $425 at Digikey. His thing is interfacing it to FPGA's. So this seems to be a hardware person's product. Most of us can probably use simpler stuff. The Pocketbeagle 2 looks interesting to me.

Neywiny 1 hour ago | parent

I think you mean "despite the STM32 in the product name, they're 64 bit compatible cores." Because STM8 was 8 bit (though I've never seen one in any design ever, I'm sure they're just before my time) and STM32 MCUs and MPUs were always 32-bit.

I'm worried they dug too deep a trench with the 32. Like how do much from Espressif is an ESP32 now despite them ranging from slower single core to faster dual core, now even with mmu, some with Wi-Fi some not...

What is in a name?

ranger_danger 1 hour ago | parent

Or they could have just meant STM32 is normally synonymous with "typical slow single-core MCU" compared to multi-ghz Cortex SoCs that we see in higher-end devices that run Linux?

NooneAtAll5 59 minutes ago | parent

he*

only one person

Neywiny 57 minutes ago | parent

Booooooooooo

throwaway81523 40 minutes ago | parent

"He or she" unless unambiguous, in that case.

Neywiny 22 minutes ago | parent

Imagine being less character efficient just to be a bigot. Hope you stocked up on RAM for all that extra text

tialaramex 36 minutes ago | parent

Singular they is a well attested pronoun in English.

If you don't know English very well I suggest not correcting other people.

kvemkon 38 minutes ago | parent

There is STM32MP257F-DK for $103 (without PCIe).

> The Pocketbeagle 2 looks interesting to me.

If only it had 2GB+ RAM. Since it has 4 cores, even more RAM would be better.

And 1Gbit Ethernet is what I'm missing.

dlcarrier 51 minutes ago | parent

From STMicro:

    STM32MP257 application processors (STM32 MPUs) are based on a dual Arm® Cortex®-A35 cores running at up to 1.5 GHz and Cortex®-M33 cores running at 400 MHz.
Why do they put a full-desktop-capable A35 processor in the sme product line as the M0 microcontrollers? I presume they're trying to milk value out of the name recognition but they're just diluting the name.

zwieback 22 minutes ago | parent

The idea is to move realtime-ish stuff to a popular processor many people have worked with and moving the Linux stuff over to an appropriate platform.

When it came out we used STM32MP257 to demo a quadrature encoder debugger/logger (for internal use, not a product) since the IO supports easy interfacing of encoders. The micro's peripherals (SPI, I2C, GPIO etc.) are easy to program at the register level and you can run a simple mainloop+interrupts thing on the micro, then run Linux for your UI, networking, etc.

The fact that there's not much activity around these kinds of platforms (CPU+micro or CPU+FPGA) suggests it's too hard to combine the two in a way that makes sense for enough people, easier to just use standard components and have them side-by-side on the PCB.

It is nice to have them on the same die, though, for people like myself who like to work on both ends but don't know how to make their own PCBs.

jauntywundrkind 29 minutes ago | parent

I'm so glad we are finally seeing small cores, something to threaten the Cortex A7, which harkens back to 2011!!

But also: Cortex A35 is from 2015! And it's still just a trickle of these small application processor cores. Having a MMU enables so much more. Look at what Baochip and Xous are doing, with small cores but with MMU, for radically better interesting OS / systems architectures.

It just feels so cursed, is so beyond my surprise here well past half way through 202X that so many cores from early 201X are still not just alive but utterly dominant. Something has gone super super super wrong in the House of ARM!