Banana Pi have unveiled a work in progress compute module in the same form factor as the Raspberry Pi CM4 but it packs a bigger punch. This new board is called the Banana Pi BPI-CM4 and features an Amlogic A311D SoC, 2 or 4GB RAM and 16GB of storage. The board will also support optional WiFi 5/6 support and a single PCI-E lane. The board will also support a single HDMI and DSI output (a downgrade from the Raspberry Pi equivalent),
The star of the show here is the Amlogic A311D. This is a 6 core (4x performance Arm Cortex-A73 at up to 2.2GHz and 2x efficiency Cortex-A53 cores at up to 1.8GHz). This SoC also features an Arm Mali-G52 GPU which claims 108.8 gigaFLOPS of FP32-precision compute.
In more detailed specifications:
- High-performance Quad core ARM Cortex-A73 and dual core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU
- ARM Mali-G52 MP4(6EE) GPU
- NPU for AI: (5.0 TOPS)
- 2/4GB LPDDR4 RAM options
- HDMI support at resolutions up to 4K
- 16G eMMC flash
- Wifi5/Wifi6 wireless module option with on-board PCB antenna and optional external antenna
- B to B connectors (same as Raspberry Pi CM4)
- One on-board Gigabit Ethernet
- One PCIe lane
Pricing and availability has not yet been confirmed but we expect more information to be announced on the official forum available here. This is going to be an interesting board, be sure to stay tuned to see how it stacks up against the Raspberry Pi CM4 in real world use when we get one in to test.