Waveshare's Core3566 Offers a Drop-In Raspberry Pi CM4 Alternative with Quad-Core CPU, Edge AI NPU
With a quad-core Rockchip RK3566 processor, GPU, neural network accelerator, and hardware encode and decode, this low-cost SOM impresses.
Embedded electronics specialist Waveshare has launched a new system-on-module (SOM) designed to be pin-compatible with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 family, packing a Rockchip RK3566 quad-core processor and a neural network coprocessor for edge AI acceleration: the Core3566.
"[The Core3566 is] a compact module which incorporates [the] Rockchip RK3566 quad-core processor with quad-core [Arm Cortex-]A55 CPU, dual-core Arm G52 GPU, VPU, NPU," Waveshare explains of its SOM design. "[It] supports video output, PCIe [PCI Express], CSI [Camera Serial Interface], and other interfaces. [It's] suitable for embedded applications. Available in different options for RAM, eMMC flash, and wireless module."
Designed as a drop-in alternative for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) family, stock of which is still short on the ground though improving, the Core3566 runs its Arm Cortex-A55 CPU cores at 1.8GHz, includes an Arm Mali-G52 2EE graphics processor, and the choice of 2GB or 4GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM. A Lite-suffixed variant comes without on-board eMMC storage, relying on a carrier board's storage capabilities instead, while the non-Lite version offer 32GB of eMMC flash.
For artificial intelligence at the edge, Rockchip's RK3566 includes a low-power neural processing unit (NPU) coprocessor, offering a claimed performance of 0.8 tera-operations per second (TOPS) at INT8 precision. There's also a vision processign popeline, two two-lane MIPI Camera Serial Interfaces (CSIs), and two two-lane Display Serial Interfaces (DSIs). The GPU is also capable of handling H.264/H.265 video at 4k60 resolution for decoding and 1080p60 for encoding, with a single HDMI interface supporting up to 4k60 displays.
Like Raspberry Pi's own CM4, the module includes a gigabit Ethernet PHY which requires hardware on the carrier board to access; there's also an optional radio transceiver which adds dual-band Wi-Fi 5 connectivity and Bluetooth 5.0 with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) support. There's one lane of USB 2.0 and one of PCI Express Gen. 2, an SD card interface, and 28 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins.
The Core3566 is available to buy on the Waveshare store now, starting at $23.99 and rising to $59.99 depending on specifications. Anyone buying the module on its own will also require a Raspberry Pi CM4-compatible carrier board to make use of its capabilities, if they don't already have one.