Firefly's Mini-ITX ITX-3588J Is The Hulk to Raspberry Pi's Bruce Banner

A Mini-ITX motherboard has been revealed by Firefly featuring the powerful eight-core Rockchip RK3588 SoC, and enough ports to make a proper PC out of the Arm-based powerhouse.  But the goal of this board is to be the brains in your AI projects.

As we saw from the recent Banana Pi board announcement, the RK3588 is an extremely capable chip. Four of its cores use Arm's Cortex A76 architecture, as seen in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoC used in smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy Fold and Black Shark 2 gaming phone. The other four cores are Cortex A55-based, which are 15 percent more efficient than the A53 cores they replace. The GPU is a quad-core Mali-G610, and there's an NPU offering 6 Tops of neural computing power for applications such as TensorFlow and MXnet. It's a solid offering in a small package, especially considering you can spec as much as 32GB of RAM.

This ITX-3588J is Mini-ITX in size and sports a backplate full of ports that would make many PCs blush. There are three HDMIs (one an 8K 60fps-capable 2.1 port), VGA, and a USB Type-C capable of video output at 8K 30fps. In addition, you get four USB 3 Type-A sockets, a pair of gigabit Ethernet connections (one with POE up to 60W), audio outputs, a micro-SD card slot, and a DC power input that can take up to 24V. 

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Elsewhere, there's a 12V eight-pin ATX power input on the board itself, a single PCIe 3.0 4x slot, four SATA 3 ports and a SATA M.2 slot, one USB 2.0 socket and three headers, Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5, plus a possible 5G/LTE expansion. There's more: you get eight GPIO pins, two UARTs, RS485 and RS232 headers, and connections for a 12V fan and even a 12V heater. 

The board can run Android or a variety of Linux flavors with UEFI boot, including Ubuntu Desktop and Debian 11, and it draws a maximum of 20W of power. Firefly makes much of its 8K encoding and decoding capabilities, positioning it as a video-playing monster with eight-channel 1080p decoding at 30fps and the ability to encode and decode simultaneously. In that case, perhaps it will be adept at handling feeds from multiple camera inputs and outputting them to multiple screens or saving them to hard drives connected to all those SATA ports. 

Sadly, the board isn't available for sale at the time of writing, and its price remains unknown.