SinoVOIP's Banana Pi M2S Packs Dual Gigabit Ethernet, an Amlogic A311D for a Range of Workloads
Designed for gateway, firewall, routing, and Internet of Things (IoT) tasks, this powerful single-board computer has a compact footprint.
SinoVOIP, the company behind the Banana Pi family of single-board computers, has unveiled its latest design: a compact board for Internet of Things (IoT) and network appliance projects, boasting two gigabit Ethernet ports.
Dubbed the Banana Pi M2S (BPI-M2S), the new board is built around the Amlogic A311D system-on-chip (SoC). While the clock speed has yet to be confirmed, the same part has launched in other devices with its four high-performance Arm Cortex-A73 cores running at 2.2GHz and its two low-power Cortex-A53 cores running at 1.8GHz.
The A311D isn't just about its six processor cores, though: The chip also includes an Arm Mali-G52 graphics processor running at 800MHz, a Cortex-M4 real-time core, and a neural processing unit (NPU) coprocessor with a claimed performance of five trillion operations per second (5 TOPS).
Elsewhere on SinoVOIP's design is 16GB of eMMC storage, expandable with a microSD slot on the underside, 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, MIPI DSI and CSI display and camera interfaces, an HDMI port, a single USB 2.0 port, and a USB Type-C connector for power — plus a Raspberry Pi-compatible general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header.
The real stand-out feature, however, comes on the networking side: A pair of gigabit Ethernet ports, giving the compact board the ability to operate as a router, firewall, or network gateway — or any other form of network appliance which needs to connect to two networks.
SinoVOIP has not yet shared pricing and availability, nor confirmed when production of the board — which has so far only been shown in render form — will begin, but more information is available on the company's Twitter.
