It may have a name that sounds like a 1960s spy plane, but the Geniatech XPI-3288 is a single board computer which looks like it has just stepped out of the Raspberry Pi factory, but it has a few differences that make it stand out from the crowd.
Measuring the same as a Raspberry Pi 4, 3.3 x 2.2 inches (85 x 56mm), the XPI-3288 looks very similar to the Pi, in fact the placement of the four USB 2.0 ports and Gigabit Ethernet is the same as the Raspberry Pi 3B. Powering the board is an Rockchip RK3200 SoC which features a quad core Arm Cortex A17 running at up to 1.6 GHz and a Mali-T764 GPU.
What is different to a Raspberry Pi is onboard eMMC flash storage, available in 8, 16 and 32GB capacities and a decidedly "tacked on" optional WiFi jack which covers part of the CPU and prevents the easy use of heatsinks to cool the unit. The WiFi Jack appears to have a PCB antenna, but there are also breakouts for external WiFi and Bluetooth antennas.
The placement of CSI / DSI connectors, used on the Raspberry Pi for cameras and the official display, is nearer to the USB ports and we assume that they are compatible with the official Raspberry Pi accessories.
The XPI-3288 comes with a single HDMI port, micro USB power input, micro SD support and a 40 pin GPIO which claims compatibility with the Raspberry Pi GPIO but that relies on the many software libraries that enable control of the GPIO to be ported and tweaked to work with the XPI-3288. Talking of software, the XPI-3288 is designed for use with Android 7.1 and "Linux". Right now there are no details on which distros are supported, merely a reference to Linux Kernel 4.4.
The Geniatech XPI-3288 is being offered for sale at $75. The same spec Raspberry Pi 4 with 2GB of RAM is $40 cheaper!
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Les Pounder is an associate editor at Tom's Hardware. He is a creative technologist and for seven years has created projects to educate and inspire minds both young and old. He has worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write and deliver their teacher training program "Picademy".
The ARM Cortex A-17 is only 32-bit, but I think this board should be a bit faster than the Raspberry Pi 3B+ at 32-bit code while being in the same form factor.
Not just because of the higher clock speed but also because of out-of-order vs in-order execution.
That is, if you absolutely need to fit it inside a Pi 3B case such as a Retroflag SNESPI or similar.
