RELOC's SCINTIX P4 Puts Espressif's Powerful ESP32-P4 Into Almost Any Raspberry Pi CM4/CM5 Carrier

Italian engineering firm RELOC is preparing to launch a crowdfunding campaign for the SCINTIX P4 — putting an Espressif ESP32-P4 system-on-chip into carrier boards designed for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 or Compute Module 5.

"SCINTIX P4 is a compact compute module that brings real-time MCU [Microcontroller Unit] performance into the Raspberry Pi CM4/CM5 carrier ecosystem," says RELOC's Andrea Ricci of the new device. "It's different from every other compatible module because it features a real-time [Espressif] ESP32-P4 MCU into the same mechanical and electrical footprint. This gives MCU developers the determinism, instant boot, and low power consumption they expect. To our knowledge, this makes SCINTIX P4 the first MCU-based compute module ever released in this form factor."

The long-delayed but now-available Espressif ESP32-P4 offers a considerable boost in performance over earlier ESP32 models: the chip includes two 32-bit RISC-V cores running at up to 400MHz with floating-point unit alongside a third low-power RISC-V core running at up to 40MHz. There's what the company terms a "Pixel Processing Accelerator (PPA)," which is a simple 2D graphics accelerator, along with codecs for H.264 and JPEG encoding and decoding. There's 768kB of memory available to the high-power cores with 32kB of static RAM (SRAM) for the low-power core plus 8kB of tightly-coupled memory (TCM), with 129kB of flash for the high-power cores and 16kB for the low-power-core. These memories are expanded by on-module 32MB pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM) and 32MB of NOR flash.

RELOC's idea is to take this chip and put it into an already-broad ecosystem: that of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 and earlier Compute Module 4. The resulting modules are pin-to-pin compatible, ready to be installed in almost any CM5/CM4-compatible carrier board to provide real-time computing capabilities — potentially, though pricing has yet to be confirmed, at a lower cost than the Raspberry Pi Compute Modules, which have been seeing ongoing price hikes in the face of component shortages.

The SCINTIX P4 includes USB 2.0 On-The-Go (Host) support, Ethernet, the same 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) connectivity as the Raspberry Pi Compute Module range, and two-lane MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) and Camera Serial Interface (CSI) video output and camera input. Radio connectivity is provided by a companion processor, the Espressif ESP32-C6, giving the module single-band Wi-Fi 6. Bluetooth 5 Low Energy (BLE), and IEEE 802.15.4 including Zigbee, Thread, and Matter support. The company promises full compatibility with Espressif's own ESP-IDF software development kit, along with Arduino IDE and PlatformIO support.

Interested parties can sign up to be notified when the crowdfunding campaign goes live on Crowd Supply; RELOC has pledged to release schematics, a bill of material, pinout diagrams, 3D mechanical models, firmware examples, "a complete demo project," and component libraries for "widely used CAD tools," confirmed to include KiCad, under an unspecified open-source license when the campaign formally launches.