Wandboard’s WandPi 8M Surfaces as Pico-PI-IMX8M with Arm Cortex-A53 SoC

Two years ago, Wandboard teased the release of their WandPi SBC, which was similar to the Raspberry Pi, and built around NXP’s i.MX8M quad-core processor and Vivante GC7000 GPU that’s designed to handle 4K HDR video applications. Wandboard intended to launch the WandPi in 2018, but sadly, it fell off the radar, and nothing ever came of the board. Strangely enough, it has once again appeared on the market, only this time it goes by the name Pico-PI-IMX8M, and it comes in multiple versions.

All five versions of the Pico-PI-IMX8M are based on NXP’s i.MX8M SoC with an Arm Cortex-A53 + M4 processor with Vivante GC7000Lite GPU capable of handling 4K HDR/UltraHD applications. The differences begin with the amount of RAM, storage, and wireless configurations, which increase with the more advanced boards.

The five versions of the Pico-PI-IMX8M include:

• Lite: 1Gb LPDDR4 RAM, 8Gb eMMC 5.1 storage
• Basic: 1Gb LPDDR4 RAM, 8Gb eMMC 5.1 storage, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1
• Pro: 2Gb LPDDR4 RAM, 8Gb eMMC 5.1 storage, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1
• Dev: 3Gb LPDDR4 RAM, 16Gb eMMC 5.1 storage, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1
• Dev-Extreme: 4Gb LPDDR4 RAM, 16Gb eMMC 5.1 storage, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1

Other notable features for the Pico-PI-IMX8M development boards include Gigabit LAN, HDMI 2.0, MIPI display, camera interface, and 40-pin expansion header, which accepts Raspberry Pi HATs. Some of the boards are also equipped with a USB Type-C port, debug interface, antenna, camera module, and 5-inch LCD display. The Pico-PI-IMX8M boards are now available starting at $158.75 for the Lite version up to $298.75 for the Dev-Extreme.