Avalue Targets the Intelligent Edge, Industrial Automation with Its New APC Single-Board Computers

Industrial computing specialist Avalue Technology has unveiled two new single-board computers, sharing a very familiar card-sized form factor but with the user's choice of two different system-on-chips (SoCs) at their heart: the Rockchip RK3566-powereed ACP-3566-PI and the NXP Semiconductors i.MX8M-driven ACP-IMX8-PI.

"Both ACP-3566-PI and ACP-IMX8-PI are designed for hardware-level compatibility with Raspberry Pi accessories," the company promises, in case you thought the resemblance to the popular single-board computer family was only skin-deep, "including MIPI displays and camera modules, GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output]-based sensors, and HAT expansions. Avalue ensures industrial-grade validation and long-term supply commitment, helping customers confidently deploy their applications in fields such as healthcare, smart retail, transportation, and automation."

The two boards, brought to our attention by CNX Software, share the familiar footprint of a full-size Raspberry Pi, right down to the single Ethernet port located next to two two-port USB Type-A stacks and a 40-pin GPIO header a the top edge. There are differences between the two that go beyond the processor on which they're built, though: some ports, like the USB Type-C power input, are shifted, and the ACP-3566-PI appears to come with a floating USB-connected daughterboard for Wi-Fi connectivity — something the ACP-IMX8-PI supports but lacks out-of-the-box.

The ACP-IMX8-PI, which Avalue positions as the model of choice for "reliable industrial computing," comes with NXP's i.MX8M chip featuring four Arm Cortex-A54 cores running at up to 1.8GHz and a 400MHz real-time Cortex-M4 core. There's 4GB of LPDDR4 memory on board, plus 32GB of eMMC 5.1 storage expandable via microSD Card. There's one full-size HDMI port plus a single two-lane MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI), analog audio, a two-lane MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) input, four USB 2.0 Type-A ports, gigabit Ethernet, and the aforementioned 40-pin GPIO header.

The ACP-3566-PI — designed for "edge intelligence with multimedia capability," Avalue says — swaps NXP's SoC out for a Rockchip RK3566, meaning a boost to four Arm Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 1.8GHz and the addition of a dedicated neural coprocessor delivering a claimed 0.8 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of minimum-precision compute for on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) workloads. Again, there's 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 32GB of eMMC storage expandable via microSD Card, and many of the same features — though this time one USB port has been upgraded to USB 3.0, and there's a bundled single-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi card.

More information on the ACP-IMX8-PI and ACP-3566-PI are available on their respective products pages — but, at the time of writing, Avalue had yet to confirm pricing and availability.