AAEON Unveils New Raspberry Pi-Like Intel Alder Lake SBCs — "The World's Smallest," It Claims
With up to four cores and 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM, this Raspberry Pi-style SBC family packs a real computational punch.
Embedded computing specialist AAEON has announced the impending launch of a Raspberry Pi-like single-board computer with a difference: it's powered by a choice of three Intel x86-64 processors and up to 8GB of LPDDR5 memory.
"The UP 7000 boasts numerous upgrades compared to its predecessors," AAEON claims of its latest design, "including 8GB of LPDDR5 system memory, onboard TPM [Trusted Platform Module] 2.0, and support for both Windows and Linux OS. Most notably, it stands out as the world's smallest board featuring onboard CPUs from the Intel Processor N-series platform."
The form factor of the new board family, brought to our attention by Liliputing, will be immediately familiar: it mimics the Raspberry Pi range, down to a compatible 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header to the top edge. It's not a slavish copy, though: the only connector to the lower edge is a DC jack for power, with the HDMI video output moved to the right-hand edge underneath one of the board's three USB 3.2 Gen. 2 ports and next to a gigabit Ethernet port.
Exact specifications vary from model to model, with three choices of Intel Alder Lake processor. The Intel Processor N50 model offers two cores running at up to 3.4GHz boost frequency in a 6W thermal design profile (TDP) with 4GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage; the N97 model doubles this to four cores running up to 3.6GHz in a 12W TDP and with 8GB of RAM and 64GB of storage; and the N100 sits between the two with four cores at a slower 3.4GHz but a 6W TDP, dropping back to 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.
Elsewhere on the board is a ten-pin header carrying two USB 2.0 ports and a UART serial bus, a connector for a 12V fan, another for a battery for the board's real-time clock, and a four-pin front panel connector. Overall, AAEON says the boards can draw up to 36W under a typical load — which explains the DC jack, there to deliver 12V of power at up to 5A.
AAEON has not yet publicly announced pricing for the boards, which it says will appear in the channel in the coming days; more information, however, is available on the company website.