The Banana Pi BPI-M5 Pro is the latest proposal from one of the manufacturers that has emerged as an alternative to the Raspberry Pi that dominates the single board computer or SBC segment.

The board retains the compact size typical of this development, Size 92 x 62 mm. Its main engine is Rockchip RK3576Combining four powerful 2.2GHz ARM Cortex-A72 cores with four powerful 1.8GHz Cortex-A53 cores, the SoC adds integrated Mali-G52 MC3 graphics, 400 Cortex-M0 MCUs and NPUs with support for up to 6 TOPS. AI performance.

The board supports up to 16 GB of RAM in LPDDR4x format and has a variety of storage options, from an eMMC slot to a microSD card reader, including what is perhaps the most interesting: M.2 2280 for PCIe 2.0 SSD installation. With this main configuration, it should easily outperform the Raspberry 5.

His connectivity It is also larger than the latest Raspberry, supports more advanced wireless standards and deploys a large number of ports:

• WiFi 6
• Bluetooth 5
• 1 HDMI 2.1
• 2 Gigabit Ethernet
• 1 USB 3.0 type A
• 1 USB 2.0 type A
• 1 USB 2.0 Type C OTG
• 1 x USB Type-C (power input only)
• 1 microSD card reader

It also has SBC components such as a 40-pin GPIO header, two MIPI-CSI camera connectors, a MIPI-DSI display connector, and other connectors for optional accessories such as a fan and RTC battery.

Banana Pi BPI-M5 Pro is officially compatible with operating systems such as Debian 11, Android 14 and Buildroot, although the Rockchip SoC and other components are supported by other Linux distributions. Images of officially supported systems are not yet available for download and we do not know the retail price at this time.

To give you an idea, ArmSoM sells a rebranded version of this Banana board (Sige5 Pro Max model), which with 16GB of RAM and 128GB of internal eMMC storage has a retail price of $148. The Banana Pi BPI-M5 Pro will cost a little less, but it will be more expensive than the Raspberry 5. In return, you get an SBC with improved performance and connectivity.