The Efika MX Smarttop is a low-power, high-performance computer based around the Freescale i.MX515 ARM Cortex-A8™ System-on-Chip. The system ships with 512MB MobileDDR2 RAM, Wireless, Bluetooth (select models), SD card slot, high quality audio support and HDMI video output.

This page aims to expand on the peripheral and IO support of the board, along with hints to documentation on the various components for Operating System and Software developers.

Revisions of the Efika MX Smarttop

There exist three revisions of the Smarttop, using different Tape-Out (TO) revisions of the i.MX515;

• Revision 1.0 - a limited release "developer edition", i.MX515 TO2. 4GB SSD. Internal MicroSD. Board Only.
• Revision 1.1 - Project and limited sale. Utilizing i.MX515 TO2. 4GB SSD. Internal MicroSD. Black case.
• Revision 1.2 - Production version. Utilizing i.MX515 TO3. 8GB SSD. Black case.

In general Genesi refers to the 1.1 board as "TO2" and the 1.2 board as "TO3". The revision 1.0 board is very rare and Genesi offers only limited support for this model.

The i.MX515 TO2 has a known errata which causes the Cortex-A8 NEON vector unit to misbehave, and as such the Linux kernel will not report it as supporting NEON code, in order to preserve system stability. This errata was fixed in TO3.

Efika MX Firmware Updates

Older Efika MX models shipped with a version of U-Boot which was hardcoded to load a 'uImage' kernel file from the first FAT partition on SD card or PATA disk. A U-Boot update is available which modifies this behavior to load a script from any supported filesystem (ext2, fat) and dynamically load a kernel and ramdisk to boot Linux or other operating systems. The update is in the form of a bootable SD card and can be found on the Linux Support link to the left of this document.

ATA Controller

The MX51 PATA controller is connected to a 4GB (TO2), 8GB (TO3) NAND SSD device. The SSD module is not removable on TO2 units. On TO3 units the SSD is connected by a ZIF PATA connector standard in 1.8" Microdrives.

MMC/SD Controller

Provides SDHC card access, tested up to 16GB. MMC memory cards operate at reduced speed.

Networking

The Smarttop provides an ASIX USB Ethernet controller connected to the Dual-Role USB controller internally. Additionally a Ralink RT3070 USB wireless card is provided for 802.11b/g/n wireless networking.

Audio

The Smarttop provides headphone and microphone connections via standard 3.5" phono connectors, connected to the SGTL5000 audio codec from Freescale. This offers extremely high quality sound output. The production Efika MX models support a small internal mono speaker when no headphone or speakers are connected. Audio clocks are gated while audio is not playing, saving power.

HDMI audio output is provided by I2S (relay from SGTL5000) and SPDIF (i.MX SPDIF TX). Only SPDIF is supported due to the difficulties in synchronizing sample rates and audio enabling across Linux Audio and Framebuffer subsystems.