Banana Pi starts selling BPI-CM4 SoM with 4 GB RAM and 16 GB storage

Banana Pi has started selling the BPI-CM4, approximately eight months after announcing the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) alternative. Initially, Banana Pi only shared 3D drawings of the system on module (SoM) and a few specifications, which it has now expanded upon in its BPI-CM4 wiki and its AliExpress product listing. To recap, the company had hoped to offer the SoM in multiple memory configurations, with 2 GB and 4 GB of RAM SKUs floated, plus 16 GB to 128 GB of eMMC flash storage.

However, Banana Pi currently only sells a sole 4 GB of RAM and 16 GB of storage SKU through AliExpress. Unfortunately, it remains to be seen when other configurations will be available. Regardless, the Amlogic A311D SoC has remained unchanged, which contains four ARM Cortex-A73 CPU cores, a further two Cortex-A53 cores, a Mali-G52 MP4 GPU and an NPU capable of delivering up to 5 TOPS of performance. As the image below highlights, the BPI-CM4 supports WiFi 5 and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, plus the same 100-pin HighSpeed and GPIO connectors as the Raspberry Pi CM4.

At the time of writing, Banana Pi sells the BPI-CM4 for US$94.74 on AliExpress, discounted from US$118.42. More details about the SoM can be found on the company's wiki, including instructions for flashing Android 9, Debian 10 and Ubuntu 20.04. As CNX Software notes, the BPI-CM4 should be compatible with Khadas VIM3 images because of their reliance on the same SoC.

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