Seeed Studio Teases High-Performance i.MX 8 Single-Board Computer Design with Two M.2 PCIe Slots

Featuring two gigabit Ethernet ports, two M.2 PCI Express slots for expansion, and USB 3.0, Seeed's proposed design is impressively capable.

Gareth Halfacree
4 years agoHW101
Seeed is looking to release a high-performance SBC, and seeks feedback. (📷: Seeed Studio)

Seeed Studio has teased a new design for an NXP Semiconductor i.MX 8M single-board computer — and is actively seeking design input from the community prior to the board entering production.

"During the past several years, we have released some SBC products such as the SeeedStudio BeagleBone Green, the ODYSSEY – STM32MP157C, the ODYSSEY – X86J4105, the NPi-i.MX6ULL. But none of them could have similar performance as the i.MX 8M," claims Seeed's Pham Nuwen. "Recently, we’ve seen many customer needs for this processor for high-end applications regarding edge computing, so we are going to make an SBC based on this i.MX 8M processor."

The proposed design takes NXP's i.MX 8M system-on-chip, which includes a quad-core Cortex-A53 CPU, low-power Cortex-M4 coprocessor, and a GC7000Lite GPU, and mates it to 2GB or 4GB of LPDDR4 memory. 8GB of eMMC storage is provided, along with a microSD slot which, interestingly, doubles as a SIM card slot.

The board's preliminary design also includes two gigabit Ethernet ports, two USB 3.0 ports along with one USB Type-C device-mode port, two MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) ports along with one Display Serial Interface (DSI) port, a touch connector, an HDMI output, 3.5mm audio input/output jack, and a 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header compatible with the Raspberry Pi pinout. The underside of the board, meanwhile, hides two PCI Express M.2 slots for further expansion.

These specifications, and the overall design of the board, are not yet finalised, with Seeed actively seeking feedback on what the community would like to see. "We've seen that there are many i.MX 8M boards were made in SoM [system on module] and carrier board style," notes Nuwen. "We didn’t choose this style because we want to lower the total cost. Do you think SoM+Carrier board is more preferred? The original i.MX 8M only has one 1000M Ethernet, we plan to add 1 more 1000M Ethernet port. This will add $5 to the cost. Do you think dual 1000M Ethernet is useful for you?"

More details, and the comment section for feedback, can be found on the Seeed blog post.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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