Banana Pi BPI-R2 Pro: Single-board computer unveiled with five RJ45 ports and a 40-pin GPIO header

BPI already sells the Banana Pi BPI-R2, a single-board computer (SBC) with plenty of connectivity. The BPI-R2 Pro will eventually replace it, while retaining much of its predecessor's I/O and connections. Accordingly, the pair are the same size, which will allow the BPI-R2 Pro to use its predecessor's case.

Specifically, BPI has equipped the BPI-R2 Pro with two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, a single USB 2.0 OTG connection, one CSI camera interface and support for dual MIPI display interfaces. Additionally, the SBC has a mini PCIe interface, an M.2 E Key interface and five RJ45 Ethernet ports. The BPI-R2 Pro has a 40-pin GPIO header too, along with optional 4G and 5G connectivity via an M.2 or mPCIe card.

The biggest change with the BPI-R2 Pro is the switch to a Rockchip RK3568 SoC, which has four ARM Cortex-A55 cores, a 0.8 TOPS NPU and a Mali-G52 GPU. BPI partners the SoC with 2 GB or 4 GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM and 16 GB, 32 GB or 64 GB of eMMC flash storage.

Unfortunately, BPI has not announced how much the BPI-R2 Pro will cost. However, the company sells the BPI-R2 for a shade under US$100, so we imagine that the Pro model will be more expensive.

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