Raspberry Pi 4 (opens in new tab) It’s not powerful enough, but Cool Pi has a new board that could give it a little more processing power.of cool pie 4b It has the same size and shape as the Raspberry Pi board. (opens in new tab)But it also has an 8-core CPU and NPU, as well as 8K video. The prices are high, but they seem to have enough stock.
The board certainly looks very familiar, but if you look closely you can spot the differences between the Cool Pi and the Raspberry Pi. Perhaps the most obvious is the bright yellow 3.5mm composite jack, but of course the Raspberry Pi 4 also has one of those, but only in black. The Cool Pi has two video outputs, one is Micro HDMI and the other is Micro DisplayPort. HDMI has reached the 2.1 standard and is capable of 8K/60 output if you want to display a screen, while DisplayPort remains in the stone age of 4K/60.
What really sets it apart is its 8-core CPU. It’s the RK3588S – an optimized version of the popular RK3588 chipset (as seen in the Rock 5) (opens in new tab)) loses the PCIe bus and generally has fewer interfaces, but still has 4 Arm Cortex-A76 cores running at 2.4 GHz (possibly requiring cooling) and 4 more Cortex -Keep A55 core for low power operation. This is an Arm DynamiQ design that puts the big.LITTLE configuration in one integrated cluster instead of two dies.
Behind all these cores are up to 16 GB of LPDDR4 RAM (4 GB and 8 GB versions available), an Arm Mali G610 GPU and an NPU capable of 6 TOPS. Next, on the edge of the board are 4 USB ports (2x USB 2, 2x USB 3), Gigabit Ethernet with PoE support, USB-C port for power, microSD for screen and camera, MIPI CSI and DSI there is a connection. There are also versions with onboard eMMC from 32GB to 128GB. The 40-pin GPIO array appears to be Raspberry Pi compliant, but I’m not sure yet. Wireless connectivity comes in the form of Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.
Operating system choice leans towards Debian and Ubuntu (opens in new tab)downloadable from Cool Pi Forum (opens in new tab)also has hardware design documentation and some source code.The board itself is available From AliExpress (opens in new tab) The 4GB version is $142 with free shipping at the end of the year.
