Banana Pi Might Be Rolling Out A 24-Core ARM Board

Making the rounds overnight has been word that the folks at Banana Pi are preparing to release a 24-core ARM board. On the surface it's exciting for ARM Linux enthusiasts, but the pricing has yet to be announced and that will largely determine the success of this reported next BPi product.

They are said to be working on a 24 core Banana Pi that may also feature NVMe solid-state storage support. But the firm details on this reported product have yet to be officially announced.

It's speculated that the BananaPi 24-core ARM board would be using the SocioNext SC2A11 SoC for the lack of other low-cost 24-core ARM SoCs out at this point. This SocioNext SoC is the same one that's powered by the Linaro DeveloperBox... That's the DeveloperBox being sold for $1200 USD but we benchmarked it and the performance is a let down though understandable considering they are just Cortex-A53 cores. The single-thread performance just competes with Raspberry Pi 3 and other A53'ish ARM SBCs while even for multi-threaded workloads we found the performance to come up shy of Intel Core i3 and AMD Ryzen 3 processors. The SoC isn't nearly to the level of what we've seen out of the NVIDIA Xavier or Ampere eMAG that offer much greater performance potential.

With having seen the performance out of the SocioNext SoC, I am not too excited about this reported BananaPi board unless the pricing would be super competitive. It's highly unlikely we would see the pricing anywhere close to current BananaPi boards, but if it can be a few hundred dollars or less, it may hold some success for those wishing to experiment with ARM Linux development, construct ARM build farms, and similar purposes. But anything close to a thousand or more like is the case with the SC2A11 DeveloperBox, the performance is rather lousy out of that SoC.

Anyhow, it will be interesting to see what comes of this board in 2019.