Low Cost Freescale iMX6 Quad Sabre Lite Development Board

i.MX6q SABRE Lite Board is a low-cost development platform based on Freescale Quad Core Cortex A9 i.MX 6Quad Application Processor. This will probably be the first low cost ARM quad-core development board to hit the market. Nvidia has previously announced the CARMA Tegra 3 CUDA Development Kit, but the price has not been announced and when I look at the picture of the board and the specs, “low cost” does not come to mind.

Low Cost Quad-core Cortex A9 Board
Freescale iMX6Q Sabre Lite Development Board

Here are the technical specifications for the Sabre Lite board:

  • Quad-Core ARM® Cortex A9 processor at 1GHz per core
  • 1GB DDR3 @ 532MHz
  • 3 display ports (RGB, LVDS, and HDMI 1.4a)
  • Two camera ports (1xParallel, 1x MIPI CSI-2)
  • Multi-stream-capable HD video engine delivering H.264 1080p60 decode,1080p30 encode and 3-D video playback in HD
  • Triple Play Graphics system consisting of a Quad-shader 3D unit, and a separate 2-D and separate OpenVG Vertex acceleration engine for superior 3D, 2D and user interface acceleration
  • Serial ATA 2.5 (SATA) at 3Gbps
  • Dual SD 3.0/SDXC card slots
  • PCIe port (1 lane)
  • Analog (headphone/mic) and Digital (HDMI) audio
  • 10/100/Gb Ethernet
  • 10-pin JTAG interface
  • 3 High speed USB ports (2xHost, 1xOTG)
  • 1xCAN2 port
  • I2C
  • General Purpose I/O for Device Control

As with the Freescale i.MX53 Quick Start Board, this board comes with a SATA interface which makes it ideal for ARM netbooks, laptops or tablets with hard drives.

The board does not seem publicly available yet (no announcement), so I do not know the price either, but considering the i.MX53 QSB board costs 149 USD, I’m hoping to see this new board around 200 USD.

The only things I know are that Linaro is working on Ubuntu for the iMX6Q Sabre Lite board, they provided some details about the board as well as instructions to generate a SD card image and build the the Linux kernel and that some other companies recently got to play with it.

Hopefully, Freescale will announce the availability and pricing of the i.MX6q Sabre Lite board later this month at Embedded World 2012 and/or Mobile World Congress 2012.

FREESCALE SEMICONDUCTOR MCIMX6Q-SL

FREESCALE SEMICONDUCTOR MCIMX6Q-SL

FREESCALE SEMICONDUCTOR – MCIMX6Q-SL – I.MX6; HDMI; LVDS; RJ45; SABRE LITE BOARD








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18 Replies to “Low Cost Freescale iMX6 Quad Sabre Lite Development Board”

  1. I would like to buy .MX6q SABRE Lite Board, I can use Freescale Quad Core Cortex A9 i.MX 6Quad Application Processor, but the Freescale dual lite Core Cortex A9 i.MX 6 dual lite Application Processor is better to me.

    please tell me the price and shipping time and the technical descriptions to me.

    1. I would also like to buy one, but it does not appear to be for sale to the general public yet. You seem to represent a company. If you want one, you should contact Freescale. They must have offices or distributors in Beijing.

      Btw, the English version of your website does not work (in Firefox).

  2. @ cnxsoft
    Regarding Arrow: It might be

    http://components.arrow.com/part/detail/NEG53800534S5781N3849

    Regarding “SABRE Lite and Nitrogen6X appear to be the same board”: Yes and no 😉 The SABRE Lite and the Nitrogen6X are mainly the same boards, they are “SW compatible”. But: Have a look to the picture above (which shows the SABRE Lite) and the picture at the bottom of

    http://boundarydevices.com/imx6-nitrogen

    which shows the Nitrogen6X. The Nitrogen6X is slightly larger, the connectors are at different places and the Nitrogen6X seems to have an additional optional TiWi 802.11 b/g/n WiFi+BT.

  3. @ Dirk
    OK, fair enough. They are not the same… 🙂

    Both are designed by Boundary Devices, so I wonder why they have 2 very similar boards.

    $299 is a bit more expensive than I expected.

  4. The board is now also available for purchase for $299 on Boundary Devices website using Revision 1.0 of the silicon (used for development) http://boundarydevices.com/products/sabre-lite-imx6-sbc/

    Shipping is not included and can be very expensive (106 USD to Thailand via UPS). The total cost (board + shipping + taxes) would be around 560 USD.

    Schematics, BOM, layout files and documentation for the board are available on the Support tab of the link above.

    Boundary devices will also sell an i.MX6 SOM soon. Schematics (PDF) are available @ http://boundarydevices.com/nitrogen6X_SOM_cpu.pdf

    I’ve also seen a cheaper 199 USD board (NIT6X) will be available in July/August on Arrow website. http://components.arrow.com/part/detail/53356543S5550N3849

  5. The differences between Nitrogen6X are listed in this post:
    http://boundarydevices.com/products/nitrogen6x-board-imx6-arm-cortex-a9-sbc/

    In a nutshell, we built the Nitrogen6X for customers who can actually use this in production. We placed all of the connectors along one edge. If you look closely at SABRE Lite you’ll see that the connectors are placed on all four sides to keep the total size down, and that really prevents any reasonable enclosure.

    And since we couldn’t help ourselves, we added a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth option, which introduced a couple of very slight software incompatibilities. Nitrogen6X will boot software written for SABRE Lite, but tweaks are needed for ethernet and analog audio to function properly.

  6. What a “normal person” can do with this board? I see now a lot of people likes this kind of things, but I’m not sure FOR DO WHAT?

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