What do you think is the best hand-solderable application processor these days? I don't see any non-BGA I.MX6 chips, but I didn't look very hard. Is the hobbyist stuck with an ARM926?
Also, in that vein, is there a similar solution for I.MX23's?
Also, in that vein, is there a similar solution for I.MX23's?
The biggest challenge with BGAs from a hobbyist perspective isn't the soldering. There are lots of hobbyists successfully reflowing BGAs with toaster ovens. The bigger problem is manufacturing the PCBs to break out the BGA balls. TI has some BGAs with a proprietary ball pattern that are designed to be broken out with just 4 layers, but that's the exception, and you generally need very narrow traces and trace clearance to route between balls and vias. I just looked at OSH Park's current capabilities and they only do up to 4 layers and their DRC specifies 6 mm minimum trace width and 6 mm minimum spacing. I've heard of people using OSH Park and similar lower-end prototyping services to manufacture one-off PCBs for fine-pitch BGAs, but you'll be failing DRC by a massive margin, so expect terrible yield on the PCBs, assuming any of them work at all.
Unfortunately I think DRC will be similarly challenging for most SoM connectors since their pin spacing has a similar pitch to BGAs, so you'll probably need an off-the-shelf break-out board to work around that. Honestly, at some point you should consider whether a vanilla dev board with low-speed GPIO headers could meet your requirements.
I think that dirtyPCBs does 6-layer boards, but they're comparatively pricey for small runs or prototypes.
There are Internet accessible Chinese PCB manufacturers that will do short runs for designs of almost any complexity, but they aren't really targeting hobbyists, though that seems to be changing.
Always cracks me up when AvE mentally converts 2.5/64" or some crazy shit into thou while thinking out loud, and then goes "metric fanboys be like whaaat?"
However, I don't think there are any SOCs with Adreno or Vivante GPUs that are also hand solderable. A quick Octopart search[1] turned up nothing.
About iMX23, a quick look seems to suggest that it has no 2D/3D capable IP on the SOC. So it likely just has a display controller of some sort. Unfortunately I don't know what that display controller is. It may be encompassed by the imx driver depending on that the hardware actually is.
[1] https://octopart.com/search?q=&start=0&category_ids=4267&spe...