AAEON has expanded its line of single-board computers with the Up Squared Pro 7000. Faced with the majority use of ARM processors, this SBC debuts with Intel N processors for the occasion, which undoubtedly gives it more potential.

You already know that Intel N (or Alder Lake-N) is the chip giant’s latest bet to power entry-level PCs, filling the gap left by the discontinued Celeron and Pentium solutions. They are built on the latest Intel 7 process technology under the new Gracemont microarchitecture. Compared to the hybrid architecture of their older brothers, which combine P and E cores, they use only E (efficient) cores in the amount of 4 or 8 native processor cores/thread. but obviously they are ideal for low cost and low consumption solutions like the one at hand.

Up Squared Pro 7000, very good potential in SBC

The new AAEON board has dimensions 102 x 102 mm and will be available in four different processor variants. The most interesting is the Intel Core i3-N305, with 8 cores/threads with a maximum frequency of 3.8 GHz, 6 Mbytes of third-level cache, an Intel UHD GPU with 32 execution units and a maximum frequency of 1.25 GHz. 15 watts.

All versions support up to 16 GB LPDDR5 memory and up to 64GB of eMMC storage, both soldered to the motherboard. Storage can be expanded with an M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 3 slot, as well as a SATA 3 connector for a hard drive or SSD. There is also an E-Key M.2 2230 slot for a wireless card that supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 wireless standards.

Among the available ports we can mention:

• 1x HDMI 2.0b
• 1 Display Port 1.2
• 1 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C
• 2 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A
• 2x USB 2.0 type A
• 1 3.5mm audio combo
• 40 pin header.
• 2 2.5GbE Ethernet
• 2 RS232/422/485 serial ports

The board supports the connection up to three screens using HDMI, DisplayPort and USB Type-C simultaneously. Since the Intel N supports TPM 2.0, you will have no problem officially running Windows 11, as well as Linux, such as Ubuntu 22.04, which is explicitly mentioned.

Although the computer is a low-power computer designed to be fanless, an available header allows you to connect a fan for active cooling. AAEON will also offer a kit that includes a chassis with an integrated heatsink and a more complete kit with a chassis, heatsink, power supply and power cable, turning this SBC into a mini-PC.

No prices were given but should be approx 179 and 219 dollars How much is the previous version? More expensive than the Raspberry SBC, but certainly with much more potential.