The lack of public datasheets makes this useless for individuals and people who want truly open hardware (like the Novena).
Looks like the Freescale i.MX6 from 2011 are still the most powerful ARM SoCs you can buy if you don't want to sign NDAs.
Looks like the Freescale i.MX6 from 2011 are still the most powerful ARM SoCs you can buy if you don't want to sign NDAs.
[1] http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/zynq-ultr...
I'd love to have a multi-core ARM64 with integrated PCIe, SATA (NVMe!), USB3, IOMMUs, maybe a few Cortex-Rs around for some real-time/MCU-type work with GPIOs and stuff... All of which I've seen and worked on in the industry. But none of that is open to the public :(
There are two levels of "open source" for hardware: the first is where the registers and behavior are documented, allowing programmers to write their own drivers for the hardware, but for moderately complex stuff doesn't get you far for copying it. The second level is where the implementation details of the chip (the Verilog or VHDL description of its behavior) are open-sourced. Only the latter would let you "easily" create a knockoff, and even that isn't within reach of any household hacker, as the base cost of fabbing a chip is still in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but yeah that would be within reach of an undercutting competitor.
(there's even a third layer of open source where the Verilog/VHDL is turned into the final layout tuned for the fab, think of it like having the source-code vs the final assembly for a given architecture. That step is costly too)