Two major pillars of NXP's sales strategy are their security architecture and integration with other NXP devices (primarily connectivity ICs since the Marvell Wi-fi acquisition).
They are typically more expensive than competitors (Infineon, TI, ST, etc). This is due to their strategy to only compete in markets where they believe they can command a healthy profit margin.
Going to be a difficult strategy to maintain in a few years when there are identical products from China for 1/2 the cost...
It's basically because of drivers for the SoC (system-on-chip, the integrated chip from e.g. Qualcomm that has cpus, graphics, sound, camera, power management, etc). They're too messy/hacky/low-quality to be "upstreamed", it is mostly impossible for anyone but the SoC vendor to port to newer versions (closed-source binary blobs), and the SoC vendor is really not motivated to do so.
It's really unfortunate too, because NXP nuked quite a bit of the NDA free support for the i.MX6 after they acquired Freescale. There's now tons of dead links, and they even removed stuff like a bunch of the SD Card images for their Sabre boards. When we asked where that stuff went we were directed to some crappy Indian outsourcing firm that kept it behind a $19,000 pay wall. I'm really happy that one of our more seasoned engineers essentially locally mirrors everything he can download when he starts a new design just for this circumstance.
The usual convincing argument comes in the form of large amounts of profit or lack there of along with liability waivers. Nothing else convinces companies faster. NXP is arguable one of the better micros to use as well, at least the Freescale derived parts.
No amount of pleading or finger pointing is likely to work.
Alternatively an open source asic based on open source cores and IP that you can have on an asic or fpga that people start having made in large quantities cutting out the middlemen might work as a serious spooky moment for the likes of microcontroller vendors.
I can see it happening, riscv and litex make it dead simple to create your own custom soc on an fpga, perhaps with custom accelerators or I/O functions. It’s really quite amazing.
Imagine taking a $7 or so max10 or lattice ice40 and rolling your own. No it’s not as efficient perhaps, but efficiency isn’t everything. Flexibility to correct things at a logic level, after the delivery, could be a godsend in some scenarios where difficulty in servicing or replacing hardware far exceeds the efficiency gains.
There’s also some neat new chips that combine a hard cpu core, some hard ip for bus interfaces, and pl. perhaps the best of all if the pl is easy to use and program with open tools. See quick logic for example.
It was Freescale. NXP has been trying to make their docs harder to get. I was in the process of writing a BSP for their Sabre boards during the acquisition, and they went as far as deleting previously free resources off their site and asking me to pay for a support contract to get them back.
NXP's stance is probably what made others shy away from the chips.
AllWinner parts are not bad if, and only if, the features you need are already clearly supported. Don’t invest in an AllWinner-based design expecting to implement key SoC features later. If it doesn’t work right now, there’s no guarantee it will ever be supported.
That said, upstream support for AllWinner parts has come a long way and continues to improve. I wouldn’t mind using them in certain projects.
However, anyone who absolutely needs good documentation and SoC support needs to stick with a vendor that emphasizes openness and good documentation. NXP i.MX is the safe choice.
Thun sunxi family of chips is really badly supported by the manufacturers, but the mainlining effort (as documented at https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort) is going pretty well. It's still a bit risky if you don't buy an entire integration package from one of the big vendors and at that point you're NDA'ed so hard you might as well go Broadcom or Qualcomm.
"Thriving" is a stronger word than I'd use. NXP still manufactures a limited number of ColdFire microcontrollers, which are loosely based on the 68k architecture. But they're listed on NXP's web site under "legacy MPUs/MCUs", and many of the parts are 10+ years old and NRND. It's pretty obvious that they don't plan on continuing the product line much further than required for support lifecycles.
I think the main problem is that there are no low-cost POWER systems for people to tinker with like there are for x86 and ARM. You are limited to expensive high-end servers, and that leads to a lack of software support.
They couldn't use Rockchip or Allwinner or Texas Instruments chips? Sure there is some work they would have to do all over again getting the drivers working and reliable, but in the long run the partnership could be far better for the company.
It would be nice if the software weren't terrible and they properly make linux kernel contributions to make their product usable. Every chinese soc that comes out is a broken experience out of box, rpi is about the only vendor that supports their product adequately. Until this changes, these chips will always be nothing more than a novelty and simple money grab left dumbfounded at why they failed so painfully.
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