Banana Pi BPI-M6 previewed with M.2 Key E expansion and powerful NPU

In September, Banana Pi introduced the BPI-PicoW-S3, a Raspberry Pi Pico W clone that it priced at under US$10. Now, the company has announced the BPI-M6, a single-board computer (SBC) powered by a SenaryTech SN3680 SoC and 4 GB of LPDDR4 RAM. As is often the case with Banana Pi, it has revealed a product without confirming availability or pricing. Based on CNX Software’s estimates, Banana Pi may start selling the BPI-M6 by the summer of 2023, with the company taking months to release older models like the BPI-R2 Pro.

For reference, the Senarytech SN3680 contains four ARM Cortex-A78 cores clocked at 2.1 GHz, a PowerVR Series9XE GE9220 GPU and a Cortex-M3 real-time security core that can operate at 250 MHz. Also, the 12 nm SoC features an NPU that delivers up to 6.75 TOPS of performance and a VPU capable of encoding 1080p footage (H.264/VP8) and decoding 4K/60 FPS content in H.265 and VP9, among others.

Additionally, Banana Pi has equipped the BPI-M6 with 16 GB to 64 GB of eMMC flash storage, along with the following I/O:

• 1x 40-pin GPIO
• 1x Gigabit Ethernet
• 1x M.2 Key E
• 1x MicroSD card slot
• 2x Micro HDMI 2.1 (1x HDMI-in/1x HDMI-out)
• 1x POE header
• 1x SPI Flash
• 4x USB 3.0 Type-A
• 1x USB Type-C (OTG & Power)

Supposedly, Banana Pi will release Android and Linux images, although it is unclear when that will occur. The BPI-M6 already has a wiki page that contains more information about the SBC, although we imagine that Banana Pi will expand the wiki with more details closer to the device’s release.

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