Hardkernel Launches the ODROID-M2, Guarantees Three Occasions the Efficiency of the Unique ODROID-M1

Single-board laptop specialist Hardkernel has unveiled a brand new entry in its ODROID household, designed as a extra highly effective successor to the ODROID-M1: the sensibly-named ODROID-M2, powered by a Rockchip RK3588S2 system-on-chip.

“We launched the ODROID-M1 about two years in the past, and the ODROID-M1S about one yr in the past,” Hardkernel explains by the use of background to the launch. “Each fashions have been efficiently equipped and proceed to be adopted as core parts in embedded methods by our B2B [Business-to-Business] prospects. We obtained suggestions that the efficiency and enter/output port configuration of the ODROID-M1/M1S have been ample for many embedded methods. Nonetheless some prospects nonetheless needed higher-end fashions geared up with high-performance processors. To satisfy the demand for increased efficiency computing energy required by vital industrial embedded system builders, we’re launching the brand new ODROID-M2 SBC right now.”

The launch comes round 9 months after the corporate celebrated 15 years within the enterprise with a shrunken model of the unique ODROID-M1, dubbed the ODROID-M1S. The place that boasted roughly identical specs as its predecessor, with a quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 operating at a barely slower 1.8GHz and with the loss of some ports, the ODROID-M2 is a completely new gadget — round thrice the velocity of the unique, workload dependent.

That efficiency achieve comes main from a transfer from the Rockchip RK3568B2 system-on-chip to the RK3588S2, which has 4 Arm Cortex-A55 cores operating at 1.8GHz alongside 4 higher-performance Cortex-A76 cores operating at 2.3GHz — give or take 100 megahertz, Hardkernel says. The chip additionally consists of an Arm Mali-G610 MP4 graphics processor operating at 1GHz and a RKNN neural community coprocessor for accelerating on-device machine studying and synthetic intelligence (ML and AI) workloads, delivering a claimed six tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute at INT8 precision.

There is a selection of 8GB or 16GB or LPDDR5 reminiscence, mannequin relying, and 64GB of eMMC — soldered to the board, relatively than fitted as a user-swappable module. A microSD Card slot affords UHS-I SDR104 efficiency, and there is an M.2 slot for a Non-Risky Reminiscence Specific (NVMe) SSD linked over a single PCI Specific Gen. 2.1 lane. For show connectivity there’s an HDMI 2.0 port supporting 4k60 output, a MIPI Show Serial Interface (DSI) port — which makes use of a 30-pin connector, incompatible with the 31-pin connector on the ODROID-M1 — and DisplayPort over a USB Kind-C connector.

Talking of USB, there’s one every of USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 hosts ports together with the aforementioned USB 3.0/DisplayPort Kind-C connector, alongside a Raspberry Pi-style 40-pin general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) header and a second 14-pin GPIO header — plus a devoted connector for a UART debug console.

The corporate claims that the board affords round triple the efficiency of the unique ODROID-M1 in multi-threaded processor-centric workloads, over 5 instances the efficiency for GPU workloads, and thrice the efficiency for workloads on the neural coprocessor. Energy draw has been measured at 1W idle and seven.5W beneath CPU load, with its DC jack accepting something from 7.5V to fifteen.5V.

The ODROID-M2 is now out there on the market on the Hardkernel retailer, priced at $115 for the 8GB model and $145 for the 16GB model; a 12V 2A energy provide is obtainable to order on the identical time for $5.50 further.