The market is stuffed with Raspberry Pi clones that promise to be sooner, cheaper or have extra ports. Nonetheless, most of those single-board computer systems use low-cost processors from lower-end manufacturers resembling RockChip and Mediatek. A brand new participant, the Thunderberry5, makes use of a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, the identical model discovered in lots of main model telephones, tablets and Arm-powered laptops.
An upcoming board from French firm MakeMyBoard, Thunderberry5 claims to be “the primary Raspberry Pi-like SBC based mostly on Qualcomm AI-CPU” and powering the present is a Qualcomm QCS610 Snapdragon. The Kryo 460 Octa-core CPU is powered by two Gold 2.2 GHz cores, and 6 Silver 1.8 GHz cores. That appears like it might be sooner than the 1.5 to 1.8-GHz CPU within the Raspberry Pi 4 B, however we would not know for positive with out testing.
The SoC’s Qualcomm AI Engine (AI Stack and Neural Processing Engine) supplies the ability for common AI duties, making the board an attention-grabbing platform for machine studying and robotics. Graphics duties are carried out by an Adreno 612, clocked at as much as 845 MHz. Thunderberry5 comes with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 64GB of eMMC 5.1 on which the OS selections are presently Android 10 or Yocto embedded Linux.
The curveball with this board is the embedded RP2040 microcontroller. An embedded microcontroller is not new. We have now reviewed Seeed’s Odyssey and LattePanda 3 Delta, every of which had an Intel CPU and an Arduino appropriate Atmel microcontroller. However, that is the primary board that we have now come throughout to characteristic the RP2040 as an embedded microcontroller.
Within the block diagram, we will see that the “RP4020” — certainly a typo for RP2040 — is linked to a 2 x 20 pin header GPIO labelled “HAT_conn”. We can not verify if that is pin appropriate with the most effective Raspberry Pi HATs and we have now contacted the mission creator for clarification. We will see within the block diagram that the RP2040 is baked into the board and makes use of a USB 2 to serial interface for communication. Because of this it should seem as a tool to the underlying Linux working system.
| SoC | Qualcomm QCS610 Snapdragon |
| Row 1 – Cell 0 | Kryo 460: 64-bit Octa-cores, 2x Gold (2.2GHz) + 6x Silver (1.8GHz) |
| Row 2 – Cell 0 | GPU: Adreno 612 @ as much as 845MHz |
| Row 3 – Cell 0 | AI: Qualcomm AI Engine / QUALCOMM AI STACK and Qualcomm® Neural Processing Engine SDK |
| RAM | LPDDR4 4GB |
| Storage | 64GB eMMC 5.1, |
| Show | HDMI 1.4 1920 x 1200 @ 60fps |
| Row 7 – Cell 0 | TFT DSI DPHY 1.2 2520 x 1080 @ 60fps |
| Video | Decode 4K30 HEVC/VP9 |
| Row 9 – Cell 0 | Encode 4k30 HEVC |
| Connectivity | Gigabit Ethernet |
| Row 11 – Cell 0 | 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi |
| Row 12 – Cell 0 | Bluetooth |
| Row 13 – Cell 0 | 4 x USB 3 |
| Row 14 – Cell 0 | USB C (5V energy solely) |
| Audio | Qualcomm WCD9341 codec |
| Row 16 – Cell 0 | +Qualcomm WSA8810 Speaker Amplifier 1W |
| Row 17 – Cell 0 | Headphone Jack |
| Sensors / Inputs | Microphone |
| Row 19 – Cell 0 | LSM6DSOTR Gyroscope / Accelerometer |
Apart from the specs and a few photos, we do not know an excessive amount of about this Raspberry Pi competitor, however we have now contacted the creator to study extra about Thunderberry5. For now, the value and launch date are a thriller, however we’ll replace this story as soon as we have now extra data.