Banana Pi BPI-M6 previewed with M.2 Key E expansion and powerful NPU
In September, Banana Pi introduced the BPI-PicoW-S3, a Raspberry Pi Pico W clone that it priced at under US$10. Now, the company has announced the BPI-M6, a single-board computer (SBC) powered by a SenaryTech SN3680 SoC and 4 GB of LPDDR4 RAM. As is often the case with Banana Pi, it has revealed a product without confirming availability or pricing. Based on CNX Software’s estimates, Banana Pi may start selling the BPI-M6 by the summer of 2023, with the company taking months to release older models like the BPI-R2 Pro.
For reference, the Senarytech SN3680 contains four ARM Cortex-A78 cores clocked at 2.1 GHz, a PowerVR Series9XE GE9220 GPU and a Cortex-M3 real-time security core that can operate at 250 MHz. Also, the 12 nm SoC features an NPU that delivers up to 6.75 TOPS of performance and a VPU capable of encoding 1080p footage (H.264/VP8) and decoding 4K/60 FPS content in H.265 and VP9, among others.
Additionally, Banana Pi has equipped the BPI-M6 with 16 GB to 64 GB of eMMC flash storage, along with the following I/O:
- 1x 40-pin GPIO
- 1x Gigabit Ethernet
- 1x M.2 Key E
- 1x MicroSD card slot
- 2x Micro HDMI 2.1 (1x HDMI-in/1x HDMI-out)
- 1x POE header
- 1x SPI Flash
- 4x USB 3.0 Type-A
- 1x USB Type-C (OTG & Power)
Supposedly, Banana Pi will release Android and Linux images, although it is unclear when that will occur. The BPI-M6 already has a wiki page that contains more information about the SBC, although we imagine that Banana Pi will expand the wiki with more details closer to the device’s release.
Source(s)
Banana Pi vis CNX Software & Liliputing
