Cool Pi CM5 debuts as new SoM with expansion board support

Cool Pi has introduced the Cool Pi CM5, a system-on-module (SoM) and potential alternative to the likes of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) or the Radxa CM5. As CNX Software notes, only a few months have passed since Cool Pi released the Cool Pi 4, which the company positions as a more powerful single-board computer (SBC) than the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. Please see our corresponding launch article for more details about the Cool Pi 4.

According to the manufacturer, the Cool Pi CM5 relies on the Rockchip RK3588, an octa-core SoC with four ARM Cortex-A76 CPU cores and four Cortex-A55 CPU cores clocked at 2.4 GHz and 1.8 GHz, respectively. Additionally, the Rockchip RK3588 has a Mali-G610 MP4 GPU and an NPU capable of delivering 6 TOPS of AI performance. Cool Pi complements the low-powered SoC with 2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB, 16 GB or 32 GB of LPDDR4/LPDDR4X SDRAM and a choice of five eMMC flash storage options ranging from 8 GB to 256 GB.

Moreover, Cool Pi offers the CM5 with an evaluation board (EVB) that has plenty of expansion options, pictured below. For now, the Cool Pi CM5 supports Android 12, Debian and Ubuntu operating systems, the details of which you can on Cool Pi's wiki. Currently, only the Cool Pi CM5 EVB is available, with SoM pricing unknown for now. At the time of writing, EVB units with 8 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage can be ordered through AliExpress for US$218.70.

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