Geniatech has announced the SOM-3568-SMARC board. This is a discreet Arm chipset compliant with the SMARC 2.1 standard for small, low-power systems.got our attention CNX software (opens in new tab)the SoM is a bit like a RAM module with a 314-pin MXM edge connector.
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It is an industrial core board designed for applications such as digital signage and IoT equipment, but the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 is still in short supply. (opens in new tab)I can imagine it being useful for projects that would have used them. The DIMM form factor is reminiscent of earlier Raspberry Pi compute modules and allows you to expose I/O from your chipset in a convenient and easy-to-connect way.
The SoC is a Rockchip RK3568 with 4 Cortex-A55 cores and 8 GB of RAM, a Mali GPU and a modest NPU. Onboard is up to 128 GB of flash storage and a wireless module with Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 4.1. Via edge connectors, it can be connected to various ports on the carrier board. This includes two Gigabit Ethernet sockets, HDMI, MIPI and LVDS available for display, an SDIO slot, two lanes of PCIe 3 and one lane of PCIe 2.1. UART, I2C, and 4-lane MIPI camera interfaces.
There’s also USB — 2x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0 Host, and 1x USB 3.0 OTG are available for builders, and a 4G/5G cellular data module is also available.
This board fits into the smaller form factor specified by SMARC, measuring just 82 x 50 mm (3.2 x 1.9 inches). This makes it larger than the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, which measures 55 x 40 mm (2.1 x 1.5 inches), and almost as large as the Compute Module 3, which measures 67.6 mm x 31 mm (1.6 x 1.2 inches). increase.
of product page (opens in new tab) It can record and encode video at 1080p 60FPS, while taking full advantage of the board’s video decoding capabilities, which peaked at 4K at 60FPS. As an industrial board, it can withstand harsh conditions including temperatures from -4°F to 185°F.
Software comes in the form of Android and the usual Linux suspects like Debian and Ubuntu, and Buildroot for embedded applications. There’s no sign of the board in the Geniatech store yet, but a larger board with the same RK3568 chipset sells for around $125.
