StarPro64: Raspberry Pi alternative with powerful NPU and PCIe

The StarPro64 has officially launched – or at least is listed on Pine64's online store. There, the price is given as $250, but the board already appears to be "out of stock" and thus sold out at the moment.

The StarPro64 is a developer board and essentially an alternative to the Raspberry Pi 5. However, a different processor architecture is installed, namely an ESWIN EIC7700X with four SiFive P550 cores based on RISC-V architecture. A particularly strong selling point is the high performing NPU, which is said to provide INT8 performance of 19.95 TOPS per second and thus lots of power for powering local AI applications. A likely and not entirely unrealistic area of application could be surveillance cameras, for example, in regard to the scanning of faces or license plates.

32 GB of LPDDR5 RAM and and 128Mb SPI boot flash are installed as standard. Users can add an optional eMMC module (up to 256GB) and a microSD slot for booting. Connectivity options include a four-lane PCIe 3 connector, two USB 3.0 ports and two USB 2.0 ports. MIPI DSI and MIPI CSI are also on board for connecting displays and cameras. HDMI output is supported at 4K resolution and 60 Hz. Futhermore, network connectivity is supported via two Gigabit Ethernet ports as well as dual band WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3.