Atmel is a well-known silicon vendor, making all sorts of system-on-chip ranging from small micro-controllers to more powerful ARM based processors. On the high-end of its SoC family, Atmel has been providing over a number of years an ARM926 based range of SoCs, the latest ones being the SAM9G and SAM9X family. Those SoC from Atmel have a very good reputation for industrial-type applications: the SoC are very well supported in the mainline Linux kernel, U-Boot and Barebox projects, and are relatively simple to work with, making them a nice choice for many projects. The quality and public availability of the datasheet for all their SoCs is also quite certainly a reason of their success. However, being based on the now old ARM926 core (implementing the ARMv5 architecture), those SoC were starting to be limited for performance-sensitive applications.
To fill this need, approximately a week ago, Atmel has unveiled a new family of SoC, the SAMA5D3, based on the Cortex-A5 core from ARM, implementing the ARMv7 architecture. Besides the higher-performance, this new family also achieve low power consumption. This family is composed of four different SoCs at the moment, that differ in the peripherals that they provide:
- ATSAMA5D31, ARM Cortex-A5 processor-based embedded MPU, 536MHz, Linux support, FPU, LCD controller, 10/100 Ethernet, security
- ATSAMA5D33, ARM Cortex-A5 processor-based embedded MPU, 536MHz, Linux support, FPU, LCD controller, gigabit Ethernet, security
- ATSAMA5D34, ARM Cortex-A5 processor-based embedded MPU, 536MHz, Linux support, FPU, LCD controller, gigabit Ethernet, dual CAN, security
- ATSAMA5D35, ARM Cortex-A5 processor-based embedded MPU, 536MHz, Linux support, FPU, dual Ethernet, dual CAN, security
A summary datasheet is available, as well as a complete datasheet (1700+ pages).
Evaluation kits are available, for the ATSAMA5D31, the ATSAM5D33, the ATSAM5D34 and ATSAM5D35.
The software support is also already available, with a linux4sam Wiki containing informations about the new evaluation boards, and the Git repository at https://github.com/linux4sam having the source code for Linux, Barebox, U-Boot or Buildroot. A lot of those patches have already been pushed upstream for example in Linux or Barebox.