Seeed Studio's ODYSSEY-Powered reServer Looks to Bring a Splash of Style to Edge Native Computing
"We developed it as a platform for different players to create edge computing for the next generation," says founder and CEO Eric Pan.
Seeed Studio is continuing to broaden its reThings family, most recently expanded with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4-powered reTerminal, with the announcement of a compact edge computing platform: the reServer X86 Series.
"With deployments of massive IoT devices in emerging scenarios and the arrival of 5G wireless technology, placing storage, computations, analytics, and communication close to where data is created is making the case for edge computing," Seeed Studio writes of the markets targeted by its latest product launch. "Featuring an open modular design, reServer offers developers the free will to customize it into an edge computing system specifically for their vertical applications.
"It supports a list of selectable barebone boards to power up the system, including x86, Raspberry Pi, Nvidia Jetson, and RISC-V. With all these technologies onboard, reServer could be turned into a router, a network-attached storage (NAS), a localized AI computing centre, and many other applications that serve the need for edge computing."
The X86 Series variant of the compact reServer, the first of the range to launch, is based around the ODYSSEY X86 V2 single-board computer, configurable with Intel Core i3, Core i5, or Core i7 processors. The enclosure measures 124x132x230mm (around 4.88x5.2x9.1in) including a removable shell designed with expansion in mind, include Thunderbolt 4 connectivity for peripherals and displays, 2.5GbE networking, and support for Wi-Fi 6, 5G LTE, LoRaWAN, and Bluetooth 5.0 Low Energy (BLE) connectivity options. All variants also include a Microchip ATSAMD21G18 Arm Cortex-M0+ coprocessor.
"From our point of view, we see that edge computing and IoT are jointing to create new demand for powerful computing, storage, and communications," says Seeed founder and chief executive Eric Pan of the launch. "You deserve to have a new form of hardware and that’s reServer. We developed it as a platform for different players to create edge computing for the next generation."
The entry-level i3 reServer X86 variant, which includes 8GB of RAM and a pre-installed 256GB nVME SSD, has been listed on Seeed's store as "price on application" via an enquiry form.
Shipping is set to begin in late June for the i3 models, with pre-orders opening for the i5 and i7 variants in late July and late August respectively.