Latest silicon revision for i.MX6

While testing Gigabit Ethernet as discussed in our last blog post, we found the first measurable differences between silicon revisions on the i.MX6.

It also came to our attention that we haven't publicly discussed the chip revisions shipped on any of our i.MX6 boards to date.

As early adopters, most of our i.MX6 customers are in close contact with their Freescale representatives and have known the situation. Others have received answers by e-mail, but quite a number haven't asked, and we haven't said.

The situation is relatively simple:

• Essentially all of the i.MX6Quad CPUs shipped before this week have contained i.MX6Q CPUs with silicon revision 1.0.
• All i.MX6Quad boards shipped from today on will contain silicon revision 1.2.
• All i.MX6Solo or i.MX6Duallite processors we've shipped to date have silicon revision 1.1.

If you're running our latest U-Boot, you can see the silicon during boot as shown below:

U-Boot 2013.01-rc1-02388-ga90f257 (Nov 27 2012 - 14:02:30)
CPU:   Freescale i.MX6Q rev1.2 at 792 MHz
...

As mentioned earlier, the first measurable difference we've seen between these chip revisions has been the improved Ethernet receive performance on i.MX6Quad Tapeout 1.2.

Please refer to the Freescale i.MX6 site for a detailed list of updates on the processor. There were quite a number of updates and whether any of them is meaningful in your application depends a lot on how you're using the parts.