Giveaway Week 2023 – i-Pi SMARC 1200 devkit with Mediatek Genio 1200 Cortex-A78/A55 SoC

We’ll end this year’s Giveaway Week with a pretty powerful development kit – ADLINK i-Pi SMARC 1200 – powered by a MediaTek Genio 1200 octa-core processor with four Cortex-A78 cores @ up to 2.2 GHz, four Cortex-A55 cores, an Arm Mali Mali-G57 MC5 GPU, 4K hardware video decoding and decoding support, and a 4.8 TOPS NPU.

The mainboard is comprised of a SMARC 2.1-compliant system-on-module with 4GB LPDDR4 memory and 64GB UFS storage and fitted with a heatsink for cooling as well as a carrier board with a 4Kp60 capable HDMI 2.0 port, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, a 3.5mm audio jack, two 40-pin headers for I/Os including one compatible with the 40-pin Raspberry Pi GPIO header, plus LVDS connectors, MIPI CSI camera connectors, and M.2 expansion slots for storage and/or wireless expansion.

I tested the MediaTek Genio 1200 devkit with a Yocto Linux image last June and ran some of the built-in benchmarks to evaluate the CPU, GPU, AI performance (with CPU or GPU but not using the NPU yet), and memory bandwidth. The UFS flash was tested with FIO reporting over 500MB/s sequential read speed and 169MB/s sequential write speed. So the performance of the kit is really good in all aspects.

But there was still some work to do on the software front at the time, as I failed to use an M.2 SSD, and another person had issues with a WiFi module, plus the AI demos did not include the 4.8 TOPS AI accelerators. Nearly five months have passed since then, so I’d expect better support for Yocto Linux now. The company is also working on Ubuntu 20.04/22.04 and Android 13 support, but I was just told those were still under testing and not quite ready for release at this time.

The i-Pi SMARC 1200 kit in the giveaway includes all the items in the photo above, with the board itself, the power supply and power cord, a micro USB cable, and a Quick Starter Guide. However, I removed the RTC battery to avoid potential issues with shipping.

To enter the draw simply leave a comment with your country and whatever else you’d like to say (no links in the body of the comment). If the country is missing, I’ll consider the entry void. Other rules are as follows:

• Only one entry per contest. I will filter out entries with the same IP and/or email address.
• Contests are open for 48 hours starting at 10 a.m. (Bangkok time) every day.
• Comments will be closed after 48 hours. If comments are open, the contest is still going on.
• Winners will be selected with random.org and announced in the comments section of each giveaway.
• I’ll contact the winner by email, and I’ll expect an answer within 24 hours, or I’ll pick another winner. Note that I may not be able to contact people who log in with Facebook, Twitter, or Google, so it’s better to use an email address to enter the draw.
• Shipping
  • $28 for registered airmail small packet or ePacket for overseas shipping payable via PayPal within 48 hours once the contest (for a given product) is complete. If PayPal is not an option in your country, we can try to find another payment solution.
  • All prizes will be shipped at the same time once we get all the winners, so around November 15.
• I’ll make sure we have 7 different winners, so if you have already won a device during this giveaway week, I’ll draw another person.

Good luck to all! ADLINK’s i-Pi SMARC 1200 can also be purchased on the company’s online store for $379 plus shipping. Note the kit there includes a WiFi module, that was not included in the review sample I received.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.