The NanoPi R6S is FriendlyELEC's latest single-board computer (SBC), following on from the likes of the NanoPi R4SE and the NanoPi R5S that arrived earlier this year. According to the company, the NanoPi R6S comes in two variants, one with a case and one without. However, both units are functionally identical. Specifically, the NanoPi R6S has 8 GB of LPDDR4x RAM running at 2,133 MHz and 32 GB of eMMC flash storage. As is often the case with SBCs, neither of these components are replaceable. Instead, FriendlyELEC has soldered the RAM and storage to the board.
Additionally, the NanoPi R6S utilises the Rockchip RK3588S, a chipset with four ARM Cortex-A76 cores clocked at up to 2.4 GHz, plus four Cortex-A55 cores limited to 1.8 GHz. Moreover, the Rockchip RK3588S features a Mali-G610 MP4 GPU and an NPU that is capable of delivering 6 TOPS of performance. For reference, the NPU supports INT4, INT8, INT16, and FP16. Separately, FriendlyELEC has included a microSD card reader, a USB Type-C port for power, a full-sized HDMI 2.1 port, several LEDs and two USB Type-A ports conforming to the USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 standards.
As FriendlyELEC's marketing images show, the NanoPi R6S possesses three Ethernet ports, too. Supposedly, two ports operate at up to 2.5 Gbps, with the third capable of supporting up to a 1 Gbps connection. At launch, the NanoPi R6S supports Android 12 and Linux distributions, including Debian 10, FriendlyCore Focal Lite and Friendly WRT 22.03. Supposedly, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS support is coming, the details for which we imagine FriendlyELEC will include in its NanoPi R6S wiki. The NanoPi R6S retails for US$119, while the SBC and its aluminium enclosure tails for US$139.