Banana Pi, ArmSoM Unveil the Artificial Intelligence Accelerating RK3576 CM5 Compute Module

Banana Pi and ArmSoM have announced a "CM5" system-on-module, dubbed either the ArmSom-CM5 or BPI-CM5 Pro depending on who you're asking — designed as a Rockchip RK3576-powered drop-in replacement for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.

"The ArmSoM-CM5 is a computing module powered by the Rockchip RK3576 second-generation 8nm high-performance AIOT [Artificial Intelligence of Things] platform," ArmSoM writes of its creation. "It integrates a quad-core [Arm] Cortex-A72 @ 2.2GHz and a quad-core Cortex-A53 @ 1.8GHz, along with a dedicated NEON co-processor, a 6 TOPS [Tera-Operations Per Second] NPU [Neural Processing Unit], and supports up to 16GB of large memory. It supports 4k video encoding and decoding, features a rich set of interfaces, and supports various operating systems."

Brought to our attention by CNX Software, the Rockchip RK3576-based system-on-module includes the aforementioned processor cores and neural coprocessor, the latter targeting on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) workloads, along with an Arm Mali G52-MC3 graphics processor and a video codec supporting H.264/H.265/MJPEG encoding and H.265/H.265/VP9/AVI1/AVS2 decoding at up to 8k30 or 4k120.

The module — which is the fourth "CM5" we've covered on the site, after Radxa's ROCK5 CM5, Orange Pi's CM5, and arturo182's "Unofficial CM5" conversion of a full-sized Raspberry Pi 5 — is designed as a pin-compatible drop-in replacement for Raspberry Pi's Compute Module 4, of particular interest for those awaiting an official Compute Module 5. There's a choice of 8GB or 16GB of LPDDR5 memory, 32GB, 64GB, or 128GB eMMC storage, and an on-board Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3 radio module.

For peripherals, the module offers HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort output supporting up to 4k120 resolution, a single gigabit Ethernet GMAC, one USB 3.0 and one USB 2.0 ports, two PCI Express Gen. 2 lanes, SATA, one four-lane and one two-lane MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI), and one four-lane Display Serial Interface (DSI), and support for a Raspberry Pi-format 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header — though exactly what's broken out from the SOM's core feature set will depend on the carrier board into which it's installed. For software, there's support for Debian and Ubuntu Linux plus an unspecified Android version — but not Raspberry Pi OS.

More information on the boards is available on the ArmSoM and Banana Pi websites; pricing has been confirmed by ArmSoM at $103 for the module only with 8GB LPDDR5 RAM and 64GB eMMC storage, with a kit including a CM5-IO carrier priced at $138.