The Raspberry Pi 5 has spent the past couple of years as the default brain for maker and creative-hardware projects, in part because alternatives either cut corners on I/O or abandoned the familiar 40-pin header entirely. Banana Pi’s BPI-M8, a new credit-card-sized SBC, keeps that header and aims to out-spec the Pi 5 everywhere else.
What’s on the board
The BPI-M8 is built around an Allwinner A733: a dual-core Arm Cortex-A76 (up to 2.00 GHz) plus a hexa-core Cortex-A55 (up to 1.80 GHz) and a single-core RISC-V E902 real-time core, paired with an Imagination Technologies BXM-4-64 MC1 GPU supporting OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.3 and OpenCL 3.0. A built-in 3 TOPS NPU handles on-device AI inference, and the video pipeline covers 4Kp60/8Kp24 H.265/VP9/AVS2 decoding alongside 4Kp30 H.265/H.264 encoding.
Memory is 4GB LPDDR5, with storage options from 8GB up to 128GB eMMC (64GB by default) plus a microSD slot and an optional UFS module socket for faster storage down the line. For camera-driven projects — a frequent need in interactive and creative-hardware builds — the board offers two 4-lane MIPI-CSI connectors alongside a 4-lane MIPI-DSI display output and HDMI 2.0b at up to 4K60.
Two variants are available: the BPI-M8A with 64GB eMMC, and the BPI-M8B with 16MB SPI NOR flash. Connectivity includes Gigabit Ethernet with optional PoE, WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, one USB 3.0 and three USB 2.0 host ports, and a USB-C OTG/power port. Expansion runs through the familiar Raspberry Pi-compatible 40-pin GPIO header plus a 16-pin FFC PCIe connector — multiplexed with DisplayPort, suggesting an external adapter board is planned — that the Pi 5 doesn’t offer in anywhere near as compact a form.
The catch: software is early
Banana Pi claims support for Android, Linux and Armbian (Ubuntu/Debian), with a Buildroot logo also listed among supported options. But as of launch, the documentation offers no source code or OS images — only a getting-started guide, with the rest of the material focused on hardware specifics rather than software. That’s a meaningful gap for anyone planning to build on day one rather than wait out a board’s early support period, and worth weighing against the spec sheet before committing a project timeline to it.