i-Pi SMARC 1200 (MediaTek Genio 1200) devkit tested with a Yocto Linux image

Last weekend I received ADLINK’s i-Pi SMARC 1200 development kit powered by MediaTek Genio 1200 Octa-core Cortex-A78/A55 AIoT processor, checked out the hardware and wanted to install the Yocto Linux image but stopped in my tracks because it looked like I had to install Ubuntu 18.04 first in a Virtual Machine or another computer. But finally, the documentation has been updated to clarify “Ubuntu 18.04 or greater” is required, and I had no problem flashing the image from a Ubuntu 22.04 laptop after installing dependencies and tools as follows:


That’s it for the tools. Eventually, the development kit will support three images: Yocto Linux, Android 13 (July 2023), and Ubuntu 20.04 (Q3 2023). So that means only the Yocto Linux image is available from the download page at this time, and that’s what I’ll be using today. We’ll need to connect the micro USB to USB cable between the host and the board, as well as the 12V power supply, before running the command to flash the image:


Output from the command:


Once this is done I can connect the board to an HDMI monitor, an Ethernet cable, and RF dongles for the mouse and keyboard to access the Yocto Desktop.

i-Pi SMARC 1200 Yocto Linux glmark2 benchmark

The desktop is basically empty, but we can start a terminal from the desktop environment or SSH (root without password) to run some benchmarks:


Those include CPU benchmarks like Coremark and Dhrystone, memory bandwidth benchmarks (memcpy/memset), graphics benchmarks like glmark2, and some AI benchmarks (MobileNet V2) running on the CPU and GPU, but apparently not on the AI accelerator (TBC). Here’s the output from glmark2:


It’s difficult to make an accurate comparison since we don’t know all parameters used during the benchmarks, but for reference, a Coremark score of 102310.51 iter/sec is between the score of an AMD FX-8350 and an Intel Core-i7 2600 launched in 2011 as shown in the table below.

CoreMark Comparison

A Rockchip RK3588 system got 73178.23 iter/sec in CoreMark (Phoronix).

Let’s look at some system information:


We can see the root partition is only 3.9GB, but the module comes with a 64GB UFS flash.

So I tried to resize the root partition with fdisk, leaving some unused sectors at the end, just in case:


before running resize2fs:


The root partition looks to be resized fine, but this does not survive a reboot…, and I have to run aiot-flash to restore the image. I tried several times with different parameters, but no luck.

Let’s check Gigabit Ethernet networking performance with iperf3:

Download:


Upload:


Full-duplex:


Everything looks good on this side.

I wanted to test the UFS performance with iozone, but the gcc toolchain has not been built into the Yocto Linux image. But I’ve noticed fio is installed in the image.

Sequential read speed


Sequential write speed:


542MB/s read speed is way faster than any eMMC flash I’ve tested, and 169MB/s write speed is also on the high side.

The i-Pi SMARC 1200 development kit also includes M.2 (PCIe) socket, so I inserted an M.2 2242 NVMe SSD into the Key-B socket for further testing.

i-Pi SMARC 1200 NVMe SSD

But the drive does not show up, and the command lspci only lists two PCIe devices:


It’s unclear what needs to be done to enable the SSD here. I can also see one person who got the kit with an M.2 WiFi module has some issues enabling it.

ADLINK i.Pi SMARC 1200 looks like a promising development kit with a powerful Cortex-A78/A55 processor, fast UFS storage, a 4.8 TOPS AI accelerator, and a good range of interfaces. But software support and documentation still need a lot of work, and hopefully, it will be worked on in the next few months. In the meantime, you can create your own custom Yocto Linux image for the i-Pi SMARC 1200 development board using the meta-layer on GitHub. The i-PI SMARC 1200 is listed for $379 on the i-Pi shop, but is currently out of stock.

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Boardcon CM3588 Rockchip RK3588 System-on-Module designed for AI and IoT applications