(Taipei, Taiwan – January 8, 2024) AAEON, a global leader in embedded computing, has released the EPIC-RPS9, the latest addition to its 4" EPIC Board portfolio, and the smallest SBC to support up to 65W socket-type CPU from the 13th Generation Intel® Core™ Processor platform.
The board is compatible with i3, i5, i7, and i9 CPUs from both the 12th Generation and 13th Generation Intel® Core™ lines, ranging from 35W ~ 65W, which offer up to 24 cores and 32 threads of performance alongside a number of the newest Intel® technologies. While all three of the EPIC-RPS9’s SKUs are 12th/13th Gen Intel® Core™ CPU agnostic, they are differentiated by their chipsets, with models equipped with Intel® R680E, Q670E, or H610E chipsets available.
The board offers up to 64GB of high-speed DDR5 memory via two dual-channel SODIMM slots, with the Intel® R680E SKU supporting ECC. This speed will certainly come in useful given the EPIC-RPS9’s high-speed interfaces, which include a total of four LAN ports, three of which run at 2.5GbE. Enhancing this is real-time performance via Intel® Time Coordinated Computing on the board’s Intel® R680E SKU, making it particularly suited to running applications that rely on time-sensitive task execution.
For internal connectors, AAEON’s intention to direct this towards the industrial sphere is clear, with the board armed with two COM connectors for RS-232/422/485, an 8-bit GPIO, and SMBus. I2C function is also available when running Windows® 10, rather than Ubuntu, and can be changed by BOM.
The EPIC-RPS9 is equipped with a 6-pin DC power connector to provide adequate power budget when it is paired with a 65W CPU, an addition that AAEON have said is to match the potential maximum peak requirement for optimum CPU performance.
Storage comes in the form of a 2.5” HDD for SATA 6Gb/s, as well as an M.2 2280 M-Key (PCIe 4.0 x4) for NVMe, along with the choice of using its PCIe 4.0 x8 slot for additional SSD storage with RAID support. The EPIC-RPS9’s PCIe 4.0 x8 slot is incredibly versatile, given the board’s extremely high processing capacity, facilitating the integration of AI accelerator modules or graphic capture cards. Meanwhile, Wi-Fi and 4G/5G expansion are available via the EPIC-RPS9’s M.2 3052 B-Key and M.2 2230 E-Key, while there is also an FPC connector (PCIe 3.0 x2) for further expansion available.