Arduino turns to Linux for the heavy lifting Portenta X8

Welcome, shortly, the Arduino Portenta X8 – a hybrid combination of microprocessor and microcontroller – which is a nine-core board that comes with the Linux OS preloaded onboard.

It’s aimed at Industry 4.0, smart city and smart agriculture applications. For example, building automation tasks or interactive smart kiosks…

Priced at €199, the system was created by Arduino working together with UK-based Foundries.io, in similar fashion to other partnerships – it made the recent Nicla Vision with with ST Microelectronics and the Portenta Cat M1/NB IoT GNSS Shield with Thales.

Basically, Arduino describes the X8 as an industrial-grade System On Module (SOM) that offers the best of two approaches: flexibility of usage of Linux for the heavy lifting of high-performance duties and other processors to run Arduino code for real-time tasks.

“Today, you cannot think about a Linux-based device without anticipating the challenges of securing and maintaining it over time,” said Arduino CEO Fabio Violante. “This requires expertise, commitment and attention to every detail related to security and maintenance. For this reason, we decided to partner with Foundries.io to simplify this approach by providing a ready-to-use solution, by embedding a FoundriesFactory in the Arduino platform.”

Nine cores they say? There’s an NXP i.MX 8M Mini Cortex-A53 quad-core (1.8GHz per core) and 1x Cortex-M4 (400MHz) for the Linux side of things and an STMicroelectronics STM32H747 dual-core Cortex-M7 up (480Mhz) and M4 32-bit Arm MCU (240Mhz) for the Arduino real-time control.

OS and application OTA updates can be done via its Wi-Fi/Bluetooth LE connectivity. And they say that, due its modular container architecture, it’s capable of running device-independent software.

There’s also LoRa and NB-IoT wireless connectivity and it supports Ethernet, USB-A, audio jacks, microSD, mini-PCIe, FD-CAN and Serial RS232/422/485. Power is from an external 6 to 36V supply or an on-board 18650 Li-ion battery for which a charger is built-in.

It can be combined with a carrier such as the Portenta Breakout or Portenta Max Carrier (which is not actually out yet – “coming soon”).

Specification

In terms of the spec of the Portenta X8, it’s as follows:

PROCESSOR	NXP i.MX 8M Mini – 4x ARM Cortex -A53 core up to 1.8GHz, 1x ARM Cortex -M4 core up to 400 MHz
MICROCONTROLLER	STM32H747AII6 Dual ARM Cortex M7/M4 IC – 1x ARM Cortex -M7 core up to 480 MHz 1x ARM Cortex -M4 core up to 240 MHz
EXTERNAL MEMORY	2 GByte Low Power DDR4 DRAM; 16 GByte eMMC
USB-C	USB-C High Speed; Host and Device operation; Power Delivery support
CONNECTIVITY	1Gbit Ethernet interface (PHY); Wi-Fi; Bluetooth® Low Energy
SECURITY	NXP® SE050C2 Crypto on a separate secure bus
DIMENSIONS	66,04 mm x 25,40 mm
CERTIFICATIONS	PSA from ARM; Arm SystemReady IR (multiple distributions)
INTERFACES	CAN; PCIe; SAI; MIPI; DSI; SPI; I2S; I2C; UART; PDM
OPERATING TEMPERATURE	-40° C to +85° C (-22° F to 185°F)

There’s also the PSA Certification. Arduino writes:

“Portenta X8 achieved PSA Certification and includes the NXP SE050C2 hardware security element to provide key generation, accelerated crypto operations and secure storage. X8 also achieved Arm SystemReady certification and integrated Parsec services, making it one of the first Cassini Products or Cloud Native Edge devices available to developers in the market. Enabling the migration of cloud-native workloads from the Cloud to the edge, the X8 contributes to a cloud-native developer experience across Arm’s diverse and secure IoT ecosystem.”

You can read more on the Arduino product page.

FoundriesFactory is a cloud platform with a service to build, test, deploy and maintain linux-based IoT and Edge devices.