YuzukiHD's Eight-Core Avaota-A1 Includes a 2 TOPS NPU, RISC-V "Remote CPU," and Connectivity Aplenty

Embedded hardware specialist YuzukiHD is preparing to launch a single-board computer built around the Allwinner T/A527 system-on-chip (SoC) and boating a RISC-V "remote CPU" and two tera-operations per second (TOPS) neural coprocessor, the Avaota-A1 — and it's made design files available under an open license already.

"The Avaota-A1 single-board computer is a versatile and high-performance computing platform designed for a variety of embedded applications," the company writes of its creation, brought to our attention by CNX Software. "Powered by an octa-core Cortex-A55 CPU running at up to [2]GHz, the Avaota-A1 offers robust processing capabilities for tasks ranging from AI inference to multimedia processing."

Designed with most connectivity to the bottom edge and powered by a DC jack, the Avaota-A1 uses Allwinner's T527 system-on-chip — giving it eight Arm Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 1.8GHz, a Mali-G56 MC1 graphics processor, a HiFi4 digital signal processor (DSP), and a neural processing unit (NPU) for on-device machine learning and edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) workloads delivering a claimed two tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute performance. A variant dubbed the Avaota-A1C swaps this chip out for the A527, offering a higher 2GHz top clock speed.

In addition to these, the board includes what the company somewhat confusingly calls a "remote central processing unit" or RCPU — a secondary processor based on the XuanTie E902 RISC-V core running at up to 200MHz. There's support for LPDDR4/4X memory, with a choice of 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB< and eMMC 5.1 storage up to 128GB expandable via microSD Card.

Elsewhere on the board is a four-lane MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) supporting sensors up to 13 megapixels in resolution, a MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI), DisplayPort, HDMI 2.0, LVDS, and RGB video outputs, analog audio, two gigabit Ethernet ports, dual-band Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 radios, two USB 3.0 ports, and USB On-The-Go and USB 2.0 Host capabilities too. A 40-pin Raspberry Pi-style general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header provides access to additional buses including I2C, I2S, SPI, and UART.

YuzukiHD isn't ready to share pricing and availability for the new board, but it has already delivered schematics, board design files, and Gerbers on GitHub, under the Strongly Reciprocal variant of the CERN Open Hardware License Version 2. Additional information is available, in Chinese, on the YuzukiHD website.