For these occasions when the Raspberry Pi 4 (opens in new tab) simply isn’t highly effective sufficient, Cool Pi has a brand new board that may supply a bit of extra in the way in which of processing capability. The Cool Pi 4 B is identical dimension and form because the Raspberry Pi board (opens in new tab), however options an eight-core CPU and an NPU, plus 8K video too. It’s additionally costlier, however there appear to be loads in inventory.
The board definitely appears to be like very acquainted, however look nearer and you may pick the variations between the Cool Pi and the Raspberry Pi. Presumably the obvious is the brilliant yellow 3.5mm composite jack, although in fact the Raspberry Pi 4 has a type of too, simply in black. The Cool Pi options two video outputs, however whereas one is a Micro HDMI, the opposite is a Micro DisplayPort. The HDMI hits the two.1 customary, permitting 8K/60 output in the event you’ve obtained the display to show it, whereas the DisplayPort is caught within the Stone Age with 4K/60.
It’s that eight-core CPU that basically units it aside. It’s the RK3588S – an optimized model of the favored RK3588 chipset (as seen within the Rock 5 (opens in new tab)) that loses the PCIe bus and has a smaller variety of interfaces usually, however which retains the 4 Arm Cortex-A76 cores working at 2.4 GHz (we suspect cooling could also be obligatory) plus 4 extra Cortex-A55 cores for low-powered operation. It’s an Arm DynamiQ design, which places the massive.LITTLE configuration right into a single built-in cluster as an alternative of placing them on two dies.
Behind all these cores sit as much as 16GB of LPDDR4 RAM (with 4GB and 8GB variations out there), an Arm Mali G610 GPU, and an NPU able to 6 TOPS. Then, across the fringe of the board, you get 4 USB ports (two USB 2, two USB 3) a gigabit Ethernet with PoE help, a USB-C port for energy, a microSD, MIPI CSI and DSI connections for screens and cameras. There are additionally variations with onboard eMMC, from 32 to 128GB. The 40-pin GPIO array appears to be like to be Raspberry Pi compliant, however that continues to be to be seen. Wi-fi connectivity comes within the type of Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.
Working system alternative leans in direction of Debian and Ubuntu (opens in new tab), downloadable from the Cool Pi discussion board (opens in new tab), the place you’ll additionally discover {hardware} design paperwork and a few supply code. The board itself is obtainable from AliExpress (opens in new tab) for $142 for the 4GB model, with free delivery and supply on the finish of the 12 months.