PINE64 Publicizes a Shock New PineTab Pill, and a Much less-Welcome Star64 SBC Delay

Open {hardware} specialist PINE64 has introduced a brand new PineTab pill, imaginatively referred to as the PineTab2, to exchange the lengthy out-of-stock unique — although this welcome information is joined by a delay to the upcoming Star64 RISC-V single-board pc.

“The unique PineTab was conceived alongside the PinePhone in early 2018 at a small pub in Brussels, and rather less than two years later the PinePhone and PineTab turned accessible for order,” Likasz Erecinski recollects. “There isn’t any want for me to recap how the pandemic unfolded, what impact it had on manufacturing in mainland China or clarify the hardships companies needed to endure as a consequence of this, however suffice to say that the unique PineTab was a sufferer of COVID and its fallout. In all equity I must also make it clear that PineTab’s dying was, in some half, a alternative on our half as choices had been made to allocate assets to safe PinePhone’s availability all through late 2020 and early 2021.”

With element shortages starting to ease, PINE64 was taking a look at bringing the PineTab again — however somewhat than merely restarting manufacturing opted to revamp the system round a brand new system-on-chip, the Rockchip RK3566. “However the PineTab2 is far more than a spec-bumped model of the unique,” Erecinski guarantees. “It’s a full bodily redesign: you are getting a steel chassis that may be very sturdy whereas additionally being straightforward to disassemble for upgrades, upkeep, and restore. Taking the PineTab2 aside is so simple as undoing a set of snap-tabs and eradicating the steel again chassis.”

Shifting again to the specs, PINE64 goals to launch the PineTab2 in two variants: one with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC storage, and one with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of eMMC storage. Each will use the Rockchip RK3566, which supplies the machine 4 Arm Cortex-A55 cores working at as much as 2GHz, an Arm Mali G52-2EE graphics processor, and a neural community coprocessor providing 1 trillion operations per second (TOPS) at INT8 precision.

Elsewhere on the pill is a pair of USB Kind-C ports, one USB 3.0 and the opposite providing USB 2.0 connectivity plus doubling as a charging port, a devoted micro-HDMI port for video, and a front-facing two megapixel digital camera and a rear-facing 5 megapixel digital camera. Inside is a shock for hackers: an M.2 PCI Specific connector, although Erecinski warns that “I would not count on most NVMe SSDs to suit contained in the chassis.” As earlier than, the pill will come bundled with a keyboard, which may be eliminated at any time.

Whereas Erecinski confirmed plans to launch the PineTab2 “someday after the Chinese language New Yr” at an as-yet unconfirmed value level, he additionally provided some much less welcome information: a delay to the Star64 RISC-V single-board pc, which is to function competitors to StarFive’s VisionFive 2.

“The Pine Retailer continues to be very intent on releasing the board previous to the Chinese language New Yr (which begins on January 22) however a agency launch date isn’t often known as of but,” Erecinski says. “At this level the board is present process an extra evaluation course of and, as a consequence of varied exterior causes, it’s onerous to foretell with full certainty when the evaluation will probably be completed. I’ll replace you on social media when extra data is offered.”

Extra particulars, together with updates on the recently-launched Ox64, “certainly one of if not the fastest-selling PINE64 SBC,” Erecinski claims, can be found on the PINE64 web site.