Today we have a new development board called Banana Pi BPI-W2 that includes the new Quad Core SoC Realtek RTD1296 an evolution of the well-known Realtek RTD1295. This SoC offers a wide connectivity options among which without doubt shines its M.2 port, its USB Type-C connector or its HDMI input among others, certainly one of the options with more connectivity of the moment to which it is added a good level of process power.
Banana Pi BPI-W2 mounts the Realtek RTD1296 SoC a Quad Core that includes 4 ARM Cortex-A53 64bit processors and a Mali-T820mp3 GPU with support for H.265 / VP9 codecs and 4K UHD resolutions up to 60fps. Includes 2GB of DDR4 RAM and 8GB of eMMC storage. The connectivity options of this board are from another planet besides the mentioned we have 2 Gigabit network ports, HDMI input and output, 2 SATA ports, a USB 3.0 port, DP video output, a PCIe 1.1 connector and another PCIe 2.0 among others.
As for software is compatible with Android 6.0 + OpenWrt and according to the developer seems to be able to run Debian 9, CentOS 64-bit, Ubuntu 16.04 and Raspbian currently based on Linux 4.1.35 although at the moment support for this SoC is partial.
- Banana Pi BPI-W2 looks like it will not see the light until 2018.
