AAEON Xtreme i12 Blends Intel Alder Lake With Raspberry Pi

AAEON, a Taiwanese maker of industrial computers and an associate company of Asus, has revealed the UP Xtreme i12 developer board, a curious mix of an Alder Lake processor with a 40-pin GPIO connector rather similar to that seen on Raspberry Pi boards, and is allegedly compatible with Raspberry Pi HATs.

At least, that’s the claim. Compatibility will be a mixture of hardware and software support, and there's a list of tested HATs on GitHub, including some from Adafruit and PiFace. The tested HATs all appear to be I2C and SPI based devices. You can add screens, accelerometers, stepper motor control, and Grove sensors through those spiky pins. It is not impossible to use another HAT with this or other SBCs, but you will need to do a lot of work port libraries and code to make it work.

Elsewhere, the board is a more conventional Intel-based design, with a choice of 12th-gen P-series processors all the way from Celeron to i7 with Intel UHD or Iris Xe graphics. Up to 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM can be specified, and there's a 2.5Gb Ethernet port, another gigabit port, two PCIe 4.0 M.2 sockets plus a SATA 3 port, USB 4, 3 and 2, full-size DisplayPort and HDMI connectors (with extra displays pushed from USB-C and Embedded DisplayPort, for a total of four 4K/60 screens), headphone socket, and front-panel connectors for putting it in a case. 

Optional modules add Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, and 5G connectivity. Power comes via a DC input, and it can accept feeds from 12V to 36V. The board comes with active cooling, and while a passively cooled case, the UP Xtreme i12 Edge, is also listed, along with bundles including power supplies and cables, it’s not available yet. The board runs Windows or Ubuntu, with Yocto support coming. As this is an x86 based board you are free to choose your own operating system.

The board is not yet showing on the AAEON e-shop, but the previous version, the UP Xtreme i11, starts from $299.