UP Squared Is A Very Capable Intel SBC For Makers & IoT

After learning of the UP-Squared SBC maker board this summer when this Intel Apollolake single board computer was added to Coreboot, the company sent over a review sample and for the past number of weeks have been putting this mini board through its paces and performance tests.

The UP-Squared has multiple USB 3.0 ports, HDMI and DP video outputs for the Intel graphics, dual Gigabit Ethernet, SATA 3.0, mini PCIe x1, M.2 2230, eMMC, and a 40-pin header. The UP Squared is certainly much more capable than the likes of the Raspberry Pi and other lower-cost Arm SBCs though does come at a heftier price of about $150 USD.

The UP Squared review sample I have been testing was equipped with an Intel Celeron N3350 SoC, 32GB of eMMC storage, and 2GB of RAM. Besides being supported by conventional x86_64 Linux distributions, the UP-Squared is also supported by Microsoft Windows for those interested.

The Celeron N3350 Apollo Lake SoC has two physical cores without Hyper Threading, 1.1GHz base frequency, 2.4GHz burst frequency, 2MB cache, and a 6 Watt TDP. The graphics found on this SoC are HD Graphics 500 with 200MHz base frequency and 650MHz burst frequency.

In my testing the UP Squared has worked out well with Ubuntu 19.04 and other modern Linux distributions without issues. While today's tests were done from Ubuntu 19.04, a Linux distribution comparison from the UP Squared will be published in the days ahead on Phoronix.