Banana Pi shows its Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative

Banana Pi shows its Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative

Banana Pi has already launched several Single Board Computers that are proposed as valid alternatives to the popular Raspberry Pi product series. Recently, the company released images depicting a render of Banana Pi BPI-CM4 which, as the name implies, will be a rival to Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.

The heart of the device is the SoC Amilogic A311D, which integrates an ARM Cortex-A73 quad core processor and an ARM Cortex-A53 dual core processor, as well as the ARM G52 MP4 (6EE) GPU, the same used on Banana Pi BPI-M2S. Unfortunately, the operating frequencies have not been disclosed, but it will likely offer higher performance than the Raspberry Pi CM4's BMC2711. For the rest, the BPI-CM4 can be equipped with up to 4GB of RAM, up to 128GB of eMMC memory for storage and has an HDMI output (via carrier card), a Wi-Fi 5/6 network card. , an Ethernet connector and PCie (the latter two also via carrier card).



Photo Credit: Banana Pi
Hardware aside, software remains an aspect that should not be underestimated. The community of enthusiasts who use Raspberry Pi for their projects is really huge and, obviously, the open source files made available are not directly compatible with Banana Pi. The latter, in any case, can count on the availability of various Linux and Android distros, including Ubuntu, Debian and Raspbian.

Render and (partial) specifications aside, Banana Pi has not released nor an alleged release date or any price. We just have to wait for further updates about it.