text: Newark, an Avnet company and global distributor of electronic components, products and solutions, is now selling from stock the new BeagleBone AI-64 single board computer (SBC) board. This is the first 64-bit open hardware single board computer designed for building performance-optimized embedded applications and brings a complete artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning system to developers.
  BeagleBone AI-64 SBC provides the convenience and expandability of the BeagleBone platform with all of the on-board peripherals required to start learning and building applications. The familiar BeagleBone cape headers provide industry-leading expansion possibilities with hundreds of open-source hardware examples and dozens of readily available off-the-shelf embedded expansion options. A simple web browser, power source and network connection are all that are needed to start building performance-optimized embedded applications.
  BeagleBone AI-64 builds on more than a decade of success in open hardware single board Linux computers. Harnessing the power of the Texas Instruments TDA4VM SoC with dual Arm Cortex-A72 cores, a programmable C7x DSP core, and deep learning, vision and multimedia accelerators, developers have access to faster analytics, more data storage options, more high-speed interfaces. This gives developers a vast amount of computing power in an easy-to-use platform and includes connectors to create applications such as autonomous robots and drones; smart buildings and factories; home security; retail automation; media servers; machine learning; machine vision and computer vision.
  The new BeagleBone AI-64 board feature set includes:
  - Expandability — BeagleBone‘s cape header compatibility for expansion with existing add-on boards and ikroBUS Shuttle header provides access to hundreds of existing Click sensors and actuators.
  - Memory — 4 GB LPDDR4, 6 GB eMMC flash with high-speed interface and a MicroSD card.
  - High speed interfaces — M.2 E-key PCIe connector to interface with Wi-Fi/Bluetooth adapters, USB 3.0 Type-C SuperSpeed interface for power input and data, two USB 3.0 Type-A SuperSpeed interface and Gigabit Ethernet.
  - Camera and display connectors — Mini DisplayPort interface, two four-lane CSI connector for camera options, and a four-lane DSI connector for popular display types.
  - User interfaces — Boot, reset and power buttons, power indication LED and five user LEDs. A 5 V DC input power, UART and JTAG 10 pin Tag-Connect for debug is also included.
  - TDA4VM Dual 64-bit Arm Cortex-A72, 2.0 GHz processor — Featuring aC7x floating point, vector DSP, 80 GFLOPS, 256 GOPS, deep-learning MMA and up to 8 TOPS (8b) up to 1.0 GHz.
  - Vision processing accelerators (VPAC) — With image signal processor (ISP) and multiple vision assist accelerators.
  - Vision assist accelerators — DMPAC, Dual 64-bit Arm Cortex-A72 microprocessor subsystem at up to 2.0 GHz, six Arm Cortex-R5F MCUs at up to 1.0 GHz, memory subsystem with up to 8 MB of on-chip L3 RAM with ECC and coherency and 12 multichannel audio serial port modules.
  Romain Soreau, head of single board computing, Newark said: “We are very pleased to announce our global in-stock availability of the new BeagleBone AI-64 SBC board. Engineers and hobbyists alike can now eliminate barriers from prototype to production with this revolutionary board, which has been built on open-source Linux from BeagleBoard.org. BeagleBone AI-64 board places a massive amount of computing power in the hands of developers in an easy-to-use, single-board computer.”
  As a global distributor, Newark provides customers with fast access to easy-to-use products for professional use with a broad range of core SBC platforms and toolkits from leading brands including Raspberry Pi, Intel (NUC range), Industrial Shields and more. Technical support is offered 24/5 to ensure engineers can take advantage of the latest technology innovations for experiments and new product design.
  Newark can support customers as they take ideas from specification through to production with end-to-end product development solutions offered via the Avnet ecosystem. Customers also benefit from free access to valuable online resources on the Newark website, and engineering and maker community, element14.