SinoVOIP BPi-M2 Preview – Quad core Banana!
December 3rd, 2014I love the smell of new electronics in the morning 🙂
I was checking on the bananapi.com forums earlier today, and I ran across the announcement of the BPi-M2 (which also reminded me that I’d forgotten to post about LeMaker’s Banana Pro)
(the images in this post are courtesy of Google circle postings by SinoVoip staff, presumably they want them widely seen)
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The board looks pretty good – we can see four USB2.0 ports, which means no need for an external hub for a lot of applications. Note the 40 pin GPIO header, up from 26 pins.
I am certain more specifications will be released over time – however we can deduce that there must be a USB2.0 hub on board, as there are four exposed USB2.0 connectors, and the A31s chipset only has two USB2.0 ports.
Hmm… I think there is one native USB2.0 port brought out, and the second port goes to a four port USB hub chip – this would account for the observed four USB2.0 ports, and the WiFi adapter on the bottom of the board.
Or perhaps the WiFi adapter goes to a direct port and the four accessible ports are from the hub? Testing will tell…
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I’d have preferred if the four USB2.0 ports were on the same side of the board… but I am not about to complain about having four ports instead of two!
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The four mounting holes seem to match the ones on the original Banana Pi – perhaps this is why the IR receiver is in the same place as on the original BPi, and why the extra USB ports are on the side!
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Note what appears to be a DC power jack in the lower left side of the board.
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You can see the push-push micro SD card socket on the top right, and below it, the WiFi module. It looks like there is a provision for an SMC WiFi antenna connector.
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Yes! There is a proper DC power supply jack above, on the lower left!
Personally, I far prefer such a jack to powering the boards with a micro USB connector as they can handle more power.
Note the stereo audio + video jack on the top right.
There was some disappointment expressed on Google+ at BPi-M2 not having a SATA port, and not having USB3.0.
While I’d love to have Sata and USB3.0, the A31s does not directly support Sata or USB3.0, so I don’t see any point in adding it on board as it would have to go through USB2.0 interface, greatly limiting its bandwidth.
I am not very familiar with the A31s, if it support some sort of external bus, or even a single PCIe lane, perhaps it would be possible to hook up a high speed USB3.0 phy to, or a Sata interface.
I can see many uses for the BPi-M2, and I am looking forward to evaluating it (and writing a review like the one I did for the Banana Pi)
For those applications that require a higher bandwidth Sata interface than can be accommodated with a USB2.0-Sata bridge, the original Banana Pi and LeMaker’s upcoming Banana Pro may be a better choice.
Those applications that need higher compute performance, the quad core A31s based BPi-M2 may be a better choice.
