High AI performance: New RISC-V SBC is a powerful Raspberry Pi 5 alternative

The Banana Pi BPI-SM10 is a new single-board computer, though it is not available just yet. It is not necessarily a single-board computer in the typical sense, but apparently more of a combination of a compute module and a corresponding carrier board. Only the carrier board exposes easy-to-use ports in their usual form. It includes, among other things, four USB 3.0 ports, as well as Gigabit Ethernet, DisplayPort and MIPI-DSI for video output, and several M.2 slots for installing SSDs, for example.

The compute module itself uses the SpacemiT K3 as its processor. It sports a total of eight X100 compute cores with a clock speed of up to 2.4 GHz. These eight cores are arranged in two clusters with four cores each and a shared L2 cache. There are also eight A100 cores. These are specifically designed to accelerate AI models, with performance rated at up to 60 TOPS. Orange Pi also gives a more specific, or more practical, figure for the AI performance. It says LLMs with 30 billion parameters can be used in a pretty meaningful way at more than 10 tokens per second.

Depending on the specific model version, LPDDR5 memory with a capacity of 8, 16, or 32GB is used. Power consumption is listed at between 18 and 35 watts. The carrier board includes a GPIO pin header, which is typical for single-board computers. Products based on Nvidia's Jetson architecture could be a possible alternative.