Banana Pi BPI-M5 Pro low-profile SBC features Rockchip RK3576 octa-core Cortex-A72/A53 AIoT SoC

Banana Pi BPI-M5 Pro

Banana Pi BPI-M5 Pro, also known as Armsom Sige5, is a low-profile single board computer (SBC) powered by the Rockchip RK3576 octa-core Cortex-A72/A53 SoC for the AIoT market that offers a mid-range offering between Rockchip RK3588 and RK3399 SoCs. The board comes with 16GB LPDDR4X and 128GB eMMC flash by default, offers dual GbE, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity, an M.2 2280 PCIe socket for expansion, HDMI and MIPI DSI display interfaces, two MIPI CSI camera interfaces, a few USB ports, and a 40-pin GPIO header. Banana Pi BPI-M5 Pro specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3576 CPU 4x Cortex-A72 cores @ 2.2GHz, four Cortex-A53 cores @ 1.8GHz Arm Cortex-M0 MCU at 400MHz GPU – ARM Mali-G52 MC3 GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0, and 3.2, OpenCL up to 2.0, and Vulkan 1.1 NPU – 6 TOPS (INT8) AI accelerator with support for INT4/INT8/INT16/BF16/TF32 mixed operations. VPU Video Decoder: […]

Orange Pi CM5 – A Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative with up to 16GB RAM, 256GB eMMC flash

Orange Pi CM5 Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative

Orange Pi CM5 is a system-on-module mostly compatible with the Raspberry Pi CM4 (and upcoming Raspberry Pi CM5?) powered by a Rockchip RK3588S octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 processor that supports up to 16GB LPDDR4 and 256GB eMMC flash compared to the Pi CM4 module that is limited to 8GB RAM and 32GB flash. Since the Rockchip RK3588S has more interfaces than the Broadcom BCM2711 found in the Raspberry Pi CM4, the company added an extra 100-pin board-to-board connector with extra interfaces such as native USB 3.0, SATA III, CAN Bus, and an additional PCIe 2.0 x1 interface for a total of two. Orange Pi CM5 Orange Pi CM5 specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3588S octa-core processor with 4x CortexA76  cores @ up to 2.4GHz, 4x CortexA55 core @ 1.8GHz Arm Mali-G610 MP4 “Odin” GPU with support for OpenGL ES1.1/2.0/3.2, OpenCL 2.2 and Vulkan 1.2 Video decoder – 8Kp60 H.265, VP9, AVS2, 8Kp30 H.264 […]

RAUC open-source OTA update solution for embedded Linux ported to Rock Pi 4 SBC

RAUC OTA firmware update Rock Pi 4

RAUC open-source OTA update solution enabling A/B updates for embedded Linux images has recently been ported to the Radxa Rock Pi 4 Model B SBC powered by a Rockchip OP1 SoC by the project’s maintainer, Leon Anavi working for Konsulto Group. If you run a Linux distribution like Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora, packages and OS images are taken care of automatically or by running a few commands. However, software engineers who build custom embedded Linux images with the Yocto Project or Buildroot must handle this themselves. Luckily, there are already open-source OTA firmware update solutions such as Mender, Balena, Torizon, OSTree, Snap, or RAUC, and we’ll look at the latter today. RAUC (Robust Auto-Update Controller) was started by Pengutronix in 2015 and eventually adopted by the community. It’s a lightweight update client that runs on an Embedded Linux device and controls the A/B update procedure when a new firmware revision […]

NUMA emulation patch boosts Geekbench 6 benchmark results by up to 18% on Raspberry Pi 5

Raspberry Pi 5 NUMA emulation

Igalia Engineer, Tvrtko Ursulin has recently submitted a patch to the Linux kernel adding a NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) emulation implementation for arm64 platforms that boosts the performance of 64-bit Arm targets by “splitting the physical RAM into chunks and utilizing an allocation policy to better utilize parallelism in physical memory chip organization”.

The NUMA emulation implementation was tested on a Raspberry Pi 5 SBC and the Geekbench 6 single-core score improved by 6%, while the multi-core score boosted by 18% after splitting into four emulated NUMA nodes. In other words, that’s like having a Broadcom BCM2712 CPU overclocked from 2.4 GHz up to 2.83 GHz.

Pine64 Oz64 RISC-V+Arm SBC to support NuttX RTOS and Debian Linux

Pine64 Oz64

Pine64 Oz64 is an upcoming credit card-sized SBC based on the SOPHGO SG2000 RISC-V+Arm(+8051) processor that currently runs NuTTX RTOS, and a Debian Linux image is also in the works. With a name likely inspired by the earlier Pine64 Ox RISC-V SBC, the Oz64 is a more powerful embedded board with 512 MB of DRAM integrated into the SG2000, a microSD card, an eMMC flash module connector, Ethernet port, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2, a USB 2.0 Type-A host port, and a 26-pin GPIO header. Pine64 Oz64 specifications: SoC – SOPHGO SG2000 Main core – 1 GHz 64-bit RISC-V C906 or Arm Cortex-A53 core (selectable) Minor core – 700 MHz 64-bit RISC-V C906 core Low-power core – 25 to 300 MHz 8051 MCU core with 8KB SRAM NPU – 0.5 TOPS INT8, supports BF16 Integrated 512MB DDR3 (SiP) Storage MicroSD card slot eMMC flash module connector Display – Optional 2-lane […]

SiFive announces Essential Gen4 RISC-V CPUs for embedded applications

SiFive Essential Gen4 RISC-V CPU IP

As the RISC-V Summit Europe 2024 is underway, SiFive has announced the fourth generation of its “Essential” RISC-V CPUs (Essential Gen4) with improved power efficiency and more flexible interfaces for SoCs used in embedded devices. The update covers 32-bit and 64-bit RISC-V cores including the U6 and U7-series 64-bit application processors, the S2, S6, and S7 64-bit real-time embedded processors, and the E2, E6, and E7 32-bit real-time embedded processors. Essential Gen4 IP keys features: Up to 40% runtime power reduction 8x different baseline embedded 32-bit and 64-bit cores From 2-stage single-issue to 8-stage superscalar Improved L2 cache and enhanced L1 memory Configuration and integration options CPU type, profile, and options On-chip memories selection System, peripheral, and front ports Advanced power management and security Debug and trace Software support includes embedded Linux and FreeRTOS operating systems and Eclipse-based IDE for C/C++ development. That’s another low-quality, light-on technical details announcement from […]

NDAA-compliant NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX and Nano bundles target drones

ARK Jetson Orin Nano NDAA Bundle

ARK Electronics has recently introduced NDAA-complaint NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX and Nano bundles designed for drones with the company’s Jetson PAB (Pixhawk Autopilot Bus) carrier board, an ARKV6X flight controller, and an SSD preloaded with NVIDIA Jetpack and the ARK UI. I’ve come across the board following a post on X pointing to an article on Tom’s Hardware about the US passing a bill called “Countering CCP Drones Act” that would effectively ban DJI drones in the US.  DJI is supposed to have a 90% market share of the U.S. hobby market, a 70% market share of the industrial market, and an over 80% market share of the first responder market, so not everybody will be happy if the bill passes in the senate and becomes enacted by the US president. But US companies making NDAA-compliant hardware and drones may bit mind, and that’s how I discovered ARK Electronics NVIDIA […]

2.5-inch Pico-ITX SBC features 13th gen Raptor Lake SoC up to Intel Core i7-1370PE

Raptor Lake Pico-ITX SBC

AAEON PICO-RAP4 is a 2.5-inch Pico-ITX SBC powered by Intel Raptor Lake processors from the penta-core Intel Processor 300U up to a 14-core Intel Core i7-1370PE, equipped with up to 32GB DDR5 SO-DIMM memory, and supporting M.2 NVMe, SATA, and mSATA storage devices. The Pico-ITX board also features two Ethernet ports (2.5GbE + GbE) with TCC and TSN support, HDMI and eDP/LVDS display interfaces, multiple USB ports, two RS232/RS422/RS485 interfaces, and I2C and GPIO interfaces for further expansion. AAEON PICO-RAP4 specifications: SoC – 13th gen Raptor Lake SoC (one or the other) – Note frequencies shown as base frequencies Intel Core i7-1370PE 14C/20T processor @ 1.9GHz with Intel UHD Graphics; PBP: 28W Intel Core i7-1370PRE 14C/20T processor @ 1.9GHz with Intel UHD Graphics; PBP: 28W Intel Core i5-1340PE 14C/16T processor @ 1.8GHz with Intel UHD Graphics; PBP: 28W Intel Core i3-1320PE 8C/12T processor @ 1.7GHz with Intel UHD Graphics; PBP: […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC