At a time when consumers are having a hard time getting their hands on a new Raspberry Pi, MangoPi is making fun of a new single board computer that’s slightly smaller than an SD card. In a recent Twitter post, MangoPi showed some images of their new unnamed module, which has a Linux-compatible SoC and no ports. In addition to being much smaller than the Raspberry Pi 4B, the new device is actually even smaller than the Raspberry PiZero 2 W. However, according to a new report from Tom’s Hardware, the new MangoPi single board computer can be called a “Linux Box”. “since there is both a blank product page with the name on the company’s website, and a discussion of it on its forum.
Judging by the photos provided by MangoPi, the so-called Lunch Box will be equipped with four Arm Cortex-A53 cores, just like the Raspberry Pi 3 and Zero 2 W. The device will also run the Allwinner Tina Linux embedded distribution based on OpenWRT. . MangoPi’s post highlights the fact that the Lunch Box is capable of outputting 1080p 60Hz video over HDMI, but since the card itself doesn’t have ports, this will likely be done via a carrier card. The Linux Box runs Allwinner H616, just like the Orange Pi Zero 2, and the CPU is equipped with a Vulkan 1.1 compliant GPU capable of decoding H.264, H.265, VP9, and more. In terms of memory, the device supports a maximum of 4GB of DDR3 or DDR4 RAM.
The chip that powers the Lunch Box also supports full disk encryption with AES, XTS, and other similar algorithms. In terms of security, tamper protection using MD5 and other methods will be supported, as well as a 160-bit hardware pseudo-random number generator and an embedded EFUSE chip for both identification and security. However, since the card itself is small, all of these ports, along with the power supply, must be provided by the carrier board.
While the new MangoPi single board computer hasn’t gone on sale yet, the company is currently in its testing phase and we’ll likely hear more when it’s available for purchase.
