Application Development

The AM6754 integrates 1x quad-core ARM Cortex®-A53 cluster for Linux applications, a Cortex®-R5F MCU Island core and two Cortex®-R5F cores for Device and Run-time Management, and 2x C7x DSP (2 TOPS each) Deep Learning Accelerators.

The big advantage of the AM67x is its combination of general-purpose compute, real-time control, and dedicated accelerators for vision and AI. You can run a high-level operating system such as Linux on the Cortex-A53 cluster while offloading deterministic or safety-critical tasks to the R5F MCUs. At the same time, workloads such as image processing, dense optical flow, deep learning, and 3D graphics can be handled by the Vision Processing Accelerator (VPAC), C7x DSPs, and MMA accelerator. This flexible architecture enables developers to integrate camera pipelines, analytics, and control functions into a single chip while maintaining high performance and low power consumption.

Tip

If multi-core application development is a new concept, here is a hypothetical example that could help clear up confusion:

You might leverage Linux running on the Cortex-A53 cluster could handle system networking, data logging, and user interfaces. Meanwhile, the Cortex-R5F cores could be dedicated to managing deterministic control loops for a robotic arm. At the same time, the Vision Processing Accelerator (VPAC) and Deep Learning (MMA) accelerator could process camera input to detect objects and run AI-based quality checks. This structure ensures that real-time control remains reliable, vision workloads run at high throughput with low CPU load, and Linux can manage communication and higher-level application logic.

There are two primary routes for application development when it comes to the AM6754 processor:

• Linux Application Development

Applications intended to run within Linux (the Cortex-A53 cluster) can be built using a cross-compilation toolchain generated with the Yocto Linux BSP (or natively from within Linux running on the AM6754 itself). Checkout the Application Development guide for more information on Linux application development.