AAEON's New SMARC Modules Pack MediaTek's Genio 700 or 510 for Edge AI Flexibility
Mini-ITX carrier board can turn them into a low-power desktop, too.
AAEON has announced a pair of SMARC 2.1-standard computers-on-module, powered by the buyer's choice of MediaTek's Genio 700 or Genio 510 system-on-chip: the uCOM-M700 and uCOM-M510.
The SMARC-shaped uCOM-M700 is, as the name implies, built around the MediaTek Genio 700 — a part unveiled back in January 2023 as sitting between the Genio 500 and Genio 1200 in the company's edge AI line-up. "With a focus on industrial and smart home products," MediaTek's Richard Lu wrote at the time, "the Genio 700 is a perfect natural addition to the line-up to ensure we can provide the widest range of support possible to our customers."
The chip comes with two Arm Cortex-A78 cores running at up to 2.2GHz plus six Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 2GHz. There's an Arm Mali-G57 MC3 graphics processor and an in-house neural coprocessor delivering a claimed four tera-operations per second (TOPS) of minimum-precision compute for on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) workloads. For those who don't need that level of performance, the uCOM-M700 dials that back to a Genio 510 — dropping the Cortex-A78 cores down to 2GHz, losing two Cortex-A55 cores for a total of four, swapping the Mali-G57 MC3 for the slower MC2, and rating the neural coprocessor at 3.2 TOPS.
Both models, brought to our attention by Linux Gizmos, come with 8GB of LPDDR4 memory on-board, plus 16GB of eMMC storage. The SODIMM-style edge connector carries signals including gigabit Ethernet, one USB 3.0 and five USB 2.0 ports, HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.4, embedded DisplayPort (eDP), and MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) video outputs, four UART buses of which one is reserved for debug purposes, a single lane of PCI Express Gen. 2, two MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) inputs, five I2C and one SPI buses, and 12 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins.
The new modules are compatible with AAEON's ECB-960T-A15, a SMARC-compliant carrier board that turns them into mini-ITX desktop machines — complete with a four-lane-mechanical PCI EXpress slot, two DisplayPort++ outputs, an HDMI output, two LCD connectors, six USB Type-A ports, two Ethernet ports, a SATA III port, and two MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) inputs.
More information on the modules and carrier board are available on the AAEON website, but at the time of writing the company had not published pricing information for either.