Turing Machines Finalizes RK1 System-on-Module Specs, Prepares to Take Orders Starting at $110

Cluster computing specialist Turing Machines has officially unveiled its promised in-house system-on-module (SOM) design, the Turing RK1 — offering eight processor cores, a neural coprocessor, and up to 32GB of RAM, and capable of dropping in to the company's existing Turing Pi 2 cluster board.

The original Turing Pi was unveiled four years ago as a mini-ITX form factor carrier board for up to seven Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 or Compute Module 3+ SOMs. The redesigned Turing Pi 2 launched in May last year, dropping the supported number of boards to four but offering compatibility with the more powerful Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 as well as NVIDIA's Jetson Nano, Jetson TX2 NX, and Jetson Xavier NX boards.

At the time, Turing Machines also teased an in-house SOM dubbed the RK1, based on the Rockchip RK3588 and offering a total of eight processor cores, a neural processing unit (NPU) coprocessor with a claimed 6 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute performance, and up to 32GB of RAM — but it isn't until now the company has finalized official specs and put a price on the device.

As promised, the Turing RK1 is built around the Rockchip RK3588 system-on-chip with four high-performance Arm Cortex-A76 cores running at up to 2.4GHz and four low-power Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 1.8GHz. There's an Arm Mali-G610 graphics processor with OpenGLES 3.2, OpenCL 2.2, and Vulkan 1.2 support, and the promised 6 TOPS NPU coprocessor. There's 16GB of eMMC storage as standard, and video codecs for 8k encode and decode support.

The board will launch, Turing Machines has confirmed, in three variants: one with 8GB, one with 16GB, and one with 32GB of LPDDR4x RAM. All three share the same physical design, and include four lanes of PCI Express Gen. 3.0, one lane of PCI Express Gen. 2.1, one USB 3.0, two USB 2.0 Host, and one USB 2.0 On-The-GO (OTG) connectivity. There's also two UARTs, one of which is dedicated to debug, with two SPI and three I2C buses, a single CAN bus controller, and "multiple sets of GPIOs [General Purpose Input/Output pins]."

All three boards have been listed on the Turing Machines shop, though at the time of writing were not yet available to buy; the 8GB variant is priced at $110, the 16GB at $160, and the 32GB at $210. Those looking to make use of the new SOMs will require a compatible carrier board, too, such as the Turing Pi 2 at $259.