Single-board laptop (SBC) specialist Orange Pi has introduced a partnership with Huawei to make a brand new board concentrating on on-device machine studying and synthetic intelligence (ML and AI) workloads and delivering as much as 20 TOPS of compute: the Orange Pi AIpro, which — for now — will probably be a Chinese language unique.

“Orange Pi teamed up with Huawei to construct a brand new synthetic intelligence ecosystem,” the corporate says of its newest system launch, in translation from the unique Chinese language. “Counting on a strong ecosystem and a wide range of enlargement equipment, Orange Pi AIpro may also help customers simply obtain supply from concepts to prototypes to mass manufacturing. It is a perfect inventive platform for makers, dreamers, and amateurs.”

The corporate’s newest SBC, dropped at our consideration by CNX Software program, is uncommon for being constructed round a Huawei system-on-chip, a reputation extra normally related to smartphones. The Huawei Ascend 310B options 4 Arm Cortex-A76 processor cores and an Arm Mali-G57-class graphics processor with a neural community processor for on-device machine studying and synthetic intelligence delivering a claimed 20 tera-operations per second (TOPS) at INT8 precision or 8 TOPS at FP16 precision.

To this, Orange Pi has added 8GB of 16GB of LPDDR4X reminiscence, two HDMI 2.0 video outputs with 4k help and a MIPI Show Serial Interface (DSI) connector, a 3.5mm analog audio/video port with stereo audio and composite video, two MIPI Digicam Serial Interface (CSI) connectors, gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 4.2 wi-fi connectivity, two USB 3.0 Sort-A and one Sort-C port, a UART console on a micro-USB connector, microSD storage, eMMC help for modules as much as 256GB, an M.2 M-key slot for Non-Unstable Reminiscence Categorical (NVMe) or SATA solid-state drives (SSDs), and a Raspberry Pi-style 40-pin general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) header.

The corporate claims the board can “successfully speed up AI functions reminiscent of goal recognition and picture classification,” and that help for the Thoughts Studio device chain means it might probably ship “one-click picture burning instruments and mannequin adaption instruments to realize minimalist improvement, permitting builders to get began shortly.” Goal use-cases detailed by the corporate embrace training and coaching in synthetic intelligence applied sciences, autonomous autos, robots, drones, and even cloud computing infrastructure.

To date, the AIpro has solely been introduced on Orange Pi’s Chinese language web site — and the corporate has indicated that, for now at the least, it can solely be obtainable in China, with listings on JD.com exhibiting a value of 889 RMB for the 8GB and 1,149 RMB (round $125 and $161) for the 16GB variations respectively.