When we talk about a motherboard, we all think of the main component or the heart of a computer. But there are other types of motherboards, the unique or simple (SBC), where a Raspberry Pi reigns that we can use to create all kinds of smart devices. The plates of the British company are not alone in this market and last week I arrive another actor to this scene, a Beagle Bone AI specially designed for artificial intelligence.
The main, or most visible, difference between the BeagleBone AI and most Raspberry Pi is the default operating system. Although there is the Raspbian of the British company itself, most of its boards (or all?) Come without an operating system, while the BeagleBone AI includes as a specification the promise of not having to download anything to include Debian, one of the most important Linux distributions that exist on which operating systems such as the famous Ubuntu are based, installed by default.
BeagleBone AI Technical Specifications and Features
- Dual Arm® Cortex®-A15 microprocessor subsystem.
- 2 C66x floating-point VLIW DSPs
- 2.5MB on-chip L3 RAM
- Two dual Arm® Cortex®-M4 coprocessors.
- 4x Embedded Vision Engines (EVEs)
- 2x dual-core Programmable Real-Time Unit and Industrial Communication SubSystem (PRU-ICSS)
- 2D graphics accelerator system.
- Dual-core PowerVR® SGX544 ™ 3D GPU.
- IVA-HD subsystem (4K @ 15fps encoding and decoding for H.264, 1080p60 for others.
- 1GB RAM and 16GB eMMC flash with high speed interface.
- USB-C for power or super-speed dual role controller.
- USB-A.
- Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 2.4 / 5GHz and Bluetooth.
- microHDMI.
- Zero download experience by default with Debian GNU / Linux.
As we read in beagleboard.org, the BeagleBoard AI fills the gap between other SBCs and already more powerful computers. What's more:
BeagleBone® AI makes it easy to explore how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used in everyday life through TI C66x digital signal processor (DSP) cores and integrated vision engine (EVE) cores compatible with a optimized TIDL machine learning
That it is more than other simple boards is also reflected in its price of $ 125 (about € 114), since, for example, the aforementioned Raspberry Pi is for about € 40 in specialized online stores. At the moment, the BeagleBone AI is only available in Mouser, OKdo, Arrow or Newark stores, but it should soon reach others like Amazon.
