Low Power State on I.MX6 processor

[coskunayyildiz]

Hi,

I have the i.MX 6Dual/6Quad processor demo board and we'll be designing our own custom board.

Power is an important issue for us and hence I try to obtain as minimum power as possible.

For our system, there will be cases where only one core will be enough and as i.MX 6Dual/6Quad is a 4 core processor, I would like to be able to turn the powers of 3 cores off when necessary. Is this possible?

Second idea is to decrease the operating frequency of the processor cores when it is necessary.

I'll appreciate any helps regarding the issues above.

Coskun

[SergioSolis]

Hello Coskum,

You cannot turn on/off cores "on the fly". Also, if you turn off 2 cores (or 3) you will not experience a lower power state because you are just emulating a dual or solo processor.

What you can do is your second idea, you can decrease the operatinv frequency when necessary through the DVFS (dynamic voltage frequency scaling).

Best regards,
Sergio

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[AnsonHuang]

Hi, Coskun

     From hardware design, you may NOT be able to power down the secondary COREs, but I think if you are running linux OS on it, you can hotplug those unnecessary COREs from userspace interface, then these COREs will be disabled from hardware, although its power is still connected, but the leakage will be very small, can be ignored compared to the whole system.