Banana Pi BPI-F4 – An industrial Edge AI SBC powered by Sunplus SP7350 SoC with 4.1 TOPS NPU

The Banana Pi BPI-F4 is a compact industrial-grade Edge AI development board built around the Sunplus SP7350 quad-core Cortex-A55 SoC with a 4.1 TOPS NPU. Compared to the SunPlus SP7021-based BPI-F2S SBC, the new BPI-F4 supports additional interfaces through terminal blocks and is suitable for AI vision, robotics, and control systems.

The board supports booting from microSD or onboard eMMC and provides USB 3.0/2.0 ports, HDMI video output, Ethernet, and a MIPI CSI input for an OV5647 camera. Connectivity options include Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. Other features include seven terminal blocks for GPIO, ADC, SPI, I²C, UART, and PWM, jumper-based power and USB mode selection, and automatic boot.

Banana Pi BPI F4 industrial Edge AI SBC

Banana Pi BPI-F4 specifications:

  • BPI-F4-Core board
    • SoC – Sunplus SP7350 (C3V)
      • CPU
        • Quad-core Cortex-A55 @ 2.1 GHz
        • Cortex-M4 MCU @ up to 400MHz for always-on sub-system
      • VPU – H.264 video decoding/encoding
      • AI Accelerator – 4.1 TOPS NPU @ 900 MHz (Sometimes 4.6 TOPS is shown in the documentation instead)
    • Memory – 4GB LPDDR4 SDRAM
    • Storage – 32GB eMMC  flash
    • Carrier board interface – 2x 100-pin board-to-board connectors, mostly compatible with the ones on the Raspberry Pi CM4/CM5 (e.g., HDMI missing as not directly supported by the SoC).
    • Dimensions – 55 x 40 mm (Raspberry Pi CM4 dimensions)
  • BPI-F4-Carrier (100-pin 0.5mm pitch board-to-board connectors)
    • Storage – MicroSD card slot
    • Display – HDMI output (1080p max) implemented via MIPI DSI to HDMI bridge
    • Camera – MIPI CSI with OV5647 camera module support
    • Networking
      • Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port via Realtek RTL8211F PHY
      • M.2 socket for Wi-Fi modules
    • USB
      • USB 3.0 Type-A port (shared with Type-C)
      • USB 3.0 Type-C port (shared with Type-A)
      • USB 2.0 Type-A port
      • USB 2.0 Type-C port (UART0 via CH340N)
    • Debugging – UART header (3.3V/5V selection jumper)
    • Expansion
      • 7x terminal blocks (GPIO, ADC, SPI, I²C, UART, PWM)
      • M.2 E-Key (22×30 mm) port for wireless module
    • Misc
      • Reset and Power buttons
      • Jumper-selectable I/O voltage (3.3 V or 5 V)
      • Sleep or power jumper
      • SP7350 boot configuration switch
      • 1.5 F super capacitor for RTC backup
    • Power Supply – 12V/2A DC input via 5.5/2.1mm barrel jack or terminal block
    • Dimensions – 134 x 101mm
Sunplus C3V SoC Block diagram
Sunplus SP7350 (C3V) SoC block diagram

The Banana Pi BPI-F4 supports Ubuntu 24.04 XFCE Desktop with Linux 6.6.47, available as bootable images from either the microSD card or the eMMC flash. These images include drivers and AI toolchains optimized for the Sunplus SP7350 SoC. The source code and compilation instructions are available on GitHub.

The board also supports TensorFlow, PyTorch, Caffe, TFLite, DarkNet, and ONNX. There are also 50 pretrained models like YOLOv5/v8/v10. Sunplus also provides a detailed user guide, NPU benchmark reports, and documentation on their official wiki. Banana Pi offers documentation with a getting started guide and other resources for the BPI-F4 board with setup instructions, boot mode configuration, firmware installation, peripheral testing, camera controls, and tips to quickly deploy AI and vision applications.

Banana Pi BPI F4 Hardware Overview
Banana Pi BPI-F4 Hardware Overview
BPI-F4-Core board Hardware Overview
BPI-F4-Core board Hardware Overview

Previously, we have seen Banana Pi introduce the BPI-F3 (SpacemIT K1) and BPI-F2P (Sunplus SP7021 “Plus1”) SBCs, but the new BPI-F4 comes with a more powerful Sunplus SP7350 SoC with four 2.1 GHz Arm Cortex-A55 cores, a Cortex-M4 controller for low-power real-time tasks, and a 4.1 TOPS NPU. The F3 is still better for 4K video and NVMe/SATA storage, and the F2P is designed for older industrial ports.

The Banana Pi BPI-F4 SBC is available on AliExpress for $68.42 plus shipping, but this price may be temporary as it includes a 20% discount going on.

Banana Pi BPI-F4 SoM and Carrier Board dimensions
Banana Pi BPI-F4-Carrier(Left) BPI-F4-Core(Right) Boards Dimensions
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Boardcon MINI1126B-P AI vision system-on-module wit Rockchip RV1126B-P SoC