AAEON, a Taiwanese manufacturer of industrial computers and an affiliate of Asus, UP Extreme i12 (opens in new tab) A dev board, an odd mix of an Alder Lake processor and a 40-pin GPIO connector, pretty similar to what you’d find on a Raspberry Pi. (opens in new tab) board and is said to be compatible with the Raspberry Pi HAT.
The UP Xtreme i12 brings 12th Gen Intel® Core™ power, onboard #LPDDR5, and extensive expansion support to set new standards in power, speed and AI performance. For more information, see our latest press release (https://t. co/AzB0p6jVp0 pic.twitter.com/CitPhWRGlGDecember 7, 2022
At least, that’s what it claims. Compatibility is a mix of hardware and software support, with a list of tested HATs. on GitHub (opens in new tab), including parts of Adafruit and PiFace. All tested HATs appear to be I2C and SPI based devices. Via these sharp pins you can add screens, accelerometers, stepper motor controls and Grove sensors. It’s not impossible to use another HAT with this SBC or any other SBC, but you’d have to do a lot of working port libraries and code to make it work.
Elsewhere, the boards are traditional Intel-based designs, with a choice of 12th Gen P-series processors from Celeron to i7 with Intel UHD or Iris Xe graphics. You can specify up to 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM, a 2.5Gb Ethernet port, another Gigabit port, two PCIe 4.0 M.2 sockets and SATA 3 ports, USB 4, 3, and 2, full-size DisplayPort and HDMI connectors (USB -C and Embedded DisplayPort for pushing additional displays for a total of four 4K/60 screens), a headphone socket, and a front panel connector to fit into the case.
Optional modules add Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, and 5G connectivity. Power is supplied from the DC input and can accept feeds from 12V to 36V. The board comes with active cooling and the case is passively cooled, UP Extreme i12 Edge (opens in new tab), listed with a bundle containing power supply and cable, but not yet available. The board will run Windows or Ubuntu and will support Yocto. Since this is an x86 based board, you are free to choose your own operating system.
The board has not yet appeared in the AAEON e-shop, but the previous version, UP Extreme i11 (opens in new tab)starting at $299.
