Khadas Edge2 Loses Its Edge Connector, Gains a Powerful Chip for Small-Footprint Edge AI Projects
Promises "similar performance to entry-level consumer PCs" from an RK3588S-based machine with 6 TOPS coprocessor.
UPDATE (09/21/2022): Orders for the Khadas Edge 2 are now live, priced at $239.90 for the "Basic" variant with 8GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage or $339.90 for the "Pro" variant with 16GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC storage. Those ordering before October 31st can take $40 off those prices as an incentive, with hardware shipping within two days of order confirmation.
The Edge 2 Basic and Pro are also available in "Arm PC" variants, which add a custom case with upper ventilation grille and bundled heatsink and fan assembly plus a pogo-pin connector at the base with UART and USB connectivity — while adding $30 to the purchase price. These, however, aren't scheduled to ship until December 20th.
Original article continues below.
Details of Khadas' most compact single-board computer, the Edge2, have leaked ahead of its launch later this month — revealing a surprise move away from the SODIMM system-on-module form factor of its predecessor plus a considerably more powerful system-on-chip.
The Edge2 comes, as the name implies, as a successor to the original Khadas Edge, a system-on-module built to the SODIMM form factor and using the Rockchip RK3399 six-core system-on-chip. The Edge2, by contrast, keeps the rough footprint but does away with the SODIMM edge connector — turning it into an ultra-compact single-board computer (SBC) instead.
Khadas has not officially announced the full specifications of the Edge2 board, promising to reveal more at an event on September 20th, but CNX Software has spilled the beans ahead of time: the Edge2 will be powered by a Rockchip RK3588S, with four high-performance 2.25GHz Arm Cortex-A76 cores alongside four power-saving 1.8GHz Cortex-A55 cores and an Arm Mali G610MC4 GPU plus a neural network coprocessor offering a claimed 6 trillion operations per second (TOPS) of compute.
Elsewhere on the board is 8GB of LPDDR4 and a choice of 32GB or 64GB of eMMC storage, for the Edge2 Basic and Edge2 Pro respectively, a vision processor offering hardware encoding of 8k30 video in H.264 and H.265 plus 10-bit 8k60 H.265 and 4k60 AV1 decode, an STMicroelectronics STM32G031K6 microcontroller handling power management and boot tasks, HDMI 2.1 output at 8k60, USB 3.1 Type-C with DisplayPort up to 4k60, two four-lane MIPI DSI connectors with 4k60 support, three four-lane MIPI CSI camera connectors, stereo microphones, a USB 3.1 Type-A port, a USB 2.0 port, and a second USB Type-C port for power with USB Power Delivery support. There's no Ethernet, but dual-band Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0.
The board is also set to come with two 30-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) expansion connectors, a four-pin fan header connected to a bundled blower and thin heatsink, and two RGB LEDs — plus a slot for a battery to power the on-board real-time clock. On the software side, the Edge2 will include support for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Android 11, and Android 12.
Pricing has yet to be confirmed, with interested parties asked to sign up for the launch event on the Khadas website; Khadas has also teased a case with what appears to be a passive heatsink, but details on this are not yet available.