SinoVoIP launched several Banana Pi router boards in the past starting with Allwinner A20 based Banana Pi BPI-R1 in 2014, and followed by Banana Pi BPI-R2 board powered by a Mediatek MT7623 processor last year. Such boards normally include multiple Gigabit Ethernet ports, as well as at least one SATA connector, and in some cases an mPCIe connector for WiFi or LTE cards. THe company also launched Banana Pi BPI-W2 board a few months ago, but that model is more geared towards multimedia router use cases.
The company has now unveiled Banana Pi BPI-R64 router board based on Mediatek MT7622 dual core Arm Cortex-A53 processor, five Gigabit Ethernet port, on-board 802.11ac WiFi, one “laptop” SATA port, as well as an optional PoE (Power-over-Ethernet) add-on board.
Banana PI RPI-R64 board specifications provided by the company – which has not always shown to be accurate -:
- SoC – MediaTek MT7622 dual-core Arm Cortex-A53 @ 1.35GHz with dedicated network accelerator, 4×4 802.11n and Bluetooth 5 connectivity
- System Memory – 1GB DDR3 SDRAM
- Storage
- 8GB eMMC flash (option 16/32/64G)
- MicroSD slot up to 256GB
- 1x SATA interface
- Connectivity
- 4x Gigabit Ethernet LAN port + 1x Gigabit Ethernet WAN port connected via Realtek RTL8367S switch controller
- 802.11n built in SoC (If the board is based on MT7622A the Bluetooth 5 is also present, if not that’s MT7622B).
- 802.11ac via Mediatek MT7615 chip
- Optional 4G module via mini PCIe socket + SIM card slot
- 2x SMA connectors for antennas
- USB – 1x USB 3.0 port
- Expansion – 40-pin GPIO header
- Misc – Reset button, 3-pin header for serial console
- Power Supply
- 12V/2A DC power barrel jack
- Optional PoE module with support for 12V/3A
The board will support OpenWrt, Android, and Linux according to the company, but I really doubt Android gets ported to that router processor. The Wiki is up, but clearly under construction, especially when it comes to software support.
SinoVoIP has a history of announcing hardware many months before launch, so I’d expect Banana Pi BPI-R64 to become available around Q1 2019.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Interesting concept from BPi again … will wait till a decent kernel, u-boot is ready..
Hope it takes less than a few years 🙂
Fellows, is there any use cases for this board? If we thinking about router, I would prefer mikrotik devices. Maybe the board will be good NAS? Ok. Is there any other boards, that can utilize Gigabit Ethernet and SATA/NVMe speeds?
> any other boards, that can utilize Gigabit Ethernet and SATA/NVMe speeds?
Gigabit Ethernet is no problem with many recent ARM boards (not talking about RPi 3 B+ of course) but what should ‘SATA/NVMe speeds’ mean? SATA on their first ‘routerboard’ was slow as hell since Allwinner’s A20 SoC contained SATA more or less by accident. I’ve never seen real storage benchmarks for their R2 and I doubt this will change with the R64 now.
Marvell Armada SoCs all have very fast SATA implementations and wrt NVMe/PCIe speeds it always depends. PCIe here is 2.0 (so Gen2 link speeds max) and since one lane is already occupied by the Wi-Fi chip there’s just one lane left (compared to what fast NVMe SSDs want — Gen3 x4 — Gen 1 x1 is just 1/8 of the theoretical bandwidth).
With Rockchip’s RK3399 SoC we get with Gen2 link speed and 4 lanes up to 1600 MB/s (web search for “Some storage benchmarks on SBCs” provides more numbers).
@cnxsoft: According to an older boot log it’s an MT7622A SoC on the board: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/6586-banana-pi-r64/
Sounds similar
https://www.cnx-software.com/2015/11/13/turris-omnia-open-source-hardware-routers-crowdfunding-campaign-is-up/
IMHO it’s more like Turris Mox: https://mox.turris.cz/en/overview/
Banana Pi BPI-R64 does not offer the modularity of Turris Mox though
Banana Pi BPI-R64 mass production version ready http://forum.banana-pi.org/t/banana-pi-bpi-r64-mass-production-version-ready/7800