Banana Pi Packs an Allwinner H618 Into the Raspberry Pi Zero Footprint with the BPI-M4 Zero
Starting at $24.50 for a model with 2GB RAM and 8GB eMMC storage, the BPI-M4 Zero single-board computers wear their inspiration proudly.
Embedded and hobbyist computing specialist Banana Pi has announced a new alternative to the Raspberry Pi Zero family, in the form of the BPI-M4 Zero — a compact single-board computer based on the Allwinner H618 quad-core Arm Cortex-A54 chip.
"BPI-M4 Zero is the successor model of M2 Zero," the company explains of its latest launch, which borrows heavily from the design of the Raspberry Pi Zero 2. "The SoC [System-on-Chip] is upgraded to H618 and the CPU frequency is increased by 25 percent. The memory is upgraded to DDR4 (2/4G[B]), the capacity is quadrupled, and 8G[B]/32G[B] eMMC is added. It supports 5G[Hz] Wi-Fi."
The Banana Pi BPI-M4 Zero is, as the company says, built around the Allwinner H618 system-on-chip, giving it four Arm Cortex-A5 running at up to 1.5GHz and an Arm Mali-G31 MP2 graphics processor running at 650MHz and delivering a claimed 20.8 giga floating-point operations per second (GFLOP/S) — though, designed as it was for use in multimedia set-top boxes, you won't find anything in the way of a machine learning and artificial intelligence coprocessor in this model.
There's on-board dual-band Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 4.2 connectivity, alongside wired Fast Ethernet — available, in a nod to the need to cram everything into the small footprint, on a flat flexible circuit (FFC) connector that will require an optional breakout board. The same connector, interestingly, carries a USB 2.0 connection, while a single standard USB 2.0 Type-C port sits alongside a second USB Type-C pulling double-duty as a power input and USB 2.0 On-The-Go (OTG) port. There's 2GB of LPDDR4 memory as standard, with 4GB as an option, and 8GB of eMMC flash with the choice of a 32GB upgrade.
For display, the board has a mini-HDMI connector — the same type as the Raspberry Pi Zero range, rather than the smaller micro-HDMI of the Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 — with support for up to 4k60 displays with HDR10 high dynamic range compatibility. There's a 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, unpopulated, with 28 GPIO pins plus power, while a further nine GPIO pins are available on that multi-functional FFC — along with wires for an infrared receiver. Storage is handled by a microSD Card slot supporting SDIO 3.0, and there are physical buttons for reset and boot mode.
More information is available on the Banana Pi website, while the board is now available to order on AliExpress for $24.50 plus shipping for 2GB RAM and 8GB eMMC or $36.50 plus shipping for the 5GB/32GB variant. Both versions are said to support Android 12 along with Debian and Ubuntu Linux.