The maker of the Banana Pi line of single-board computers has unveiled a new Banana Pi BPI-R4 model that’s designed to be used as a router, firewall, file server, or for other networking tasks.
Powered by a quad-core ARM Cortex-A73 processor and 4GB of DDR4 memory, the board features up to two 10 GbE Ethernet interfaces, four Gigabit Ethernet ports, support for WiFi 7 wireless connections.
Pricing and availability haven’t been announced yet, but you can find specs at the Banana Pi Wiki.
The board measures 148 x 101mm (5.8″ x 4″) and features a MediaTek MT7988A processor that’s also known as the Filogic 880. It’s a chip designed for routers and features support for tri-band WiFi 7 connectivity and up to two 10 GbE Ethernet connections. The chip features four ARM Cortex-A73 CPU cores with support for speeds up to 1.8 GHz and an NPU (Network Processing Unit) that MediaTek says offers hardware-accelerated managing of network connections to keep data moving quickly without overtaxing the CPU.
While the board ships standard with four Gigabit Ethernet ports and at least one 10 GbE Ethernet connectors, Banana Pi says some configurations will feature two 10 GbE ports while others will have one 10 GbE and one 2.5 GbE.
Other features include M.2 slots that can be used to add 4G or 5G modems and/or PCie 3.0 NVMe solid state storage, three SIM card slots, a microSD card reader, 8GB of eMMC flash storage, and a single USB 3.2 Type-A port plus a 26-pin GPIO header.
For power, you can use a USB Type-C connector for a 20V USB-Pd charger, or a DC power jack for 12V/5.2A or 19V/3.2A power supplies.
