# Banana Pi BPI-M8 Allwinner A733 SBC targets Raspberry Pi 5 with PCIe FFC, UFS socket

> **Key takeaway:** The Banana Pi BPI-M8 is a credit card-sized board built around the Allwinner A733 SoC with a heterogeneous Arm/RISC-V CPU cluster, Imagination GPU, and 3 TOPS NPU, but currently lacks published source code or OS images despite claims of Android, Linux, and Armbian support.

**Published:** 2026-11-02T10:47:16+00:00 
**Source:** CNX Software 
**Category:** open-hardware 
**Canonical URL:** https://fosswire.org/news/banana-pi-bpi-m8-allwinner-a733-sbc-targets-raspberry-pi-5-w.html 

## Summary
Banana Pi has introduced the BPI-M8, a single-board computer positioned as an alternative to the Raspberry Pi 5 and powered by the Allwinner A733 system-on-chip. The board features a dual-core Cortex-A76 and hexa-core Cortex-A55 arrangement alongside a RISC-V E902 real-time core, 4GB of LPDDR5 memory, and an Imagination BXM-4-64 MC1 GPU with Vulkan 1.3 support. Two variants exist: the BPI-M8A with 64GB eMMC flash priced at $109, and the BPI-M8B with 16MB SPI NOR flash at $73.

The BPI-M8 measures 85 x 56 mm and includes a 40-pin Raspberry Pi-compatible GPIO header, HDMI 2.0b output, MIPI DSI and dual MIPI CSI interfaces, Gigabit Ethernet with optional PoE, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0, and a 16-pin FFC PCIe connector. Notably, the board also carries a UFS module socket for expandable storage. However, the source text emphasizes that no source code or operating system images are currently available from Banana Pi, and mainline Linux support for the A733 has progressed more slowly than earlier promises suggested.

## Allwinner A733 architecture and BPI-M8 I/O
- **CPU topology:** The Allwinner A733 combines two Cortex-A76 cores at up to 2.00 GHz, six Cortex-A55 cores at up to 1.80 GHz, and a single RISC-V E902 core for real-time tasks, manufactured on a 12 nm process.
- **GPU and compute APIs:** The Imagination Technologies BXM-4-64 MC1 GPU supports OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.3, and OpenCL 3.0, while a dedicated NPU provides 3 TOPS of AI inference capacity.
- **Video engine:** The VPU handles 4Kp60 or 8Kp24 decoding for H.265, VP9, and AVS2 formats, plus 4Kp30 H.264 decode and 4Kp30 H.265/H.264 encode.
- **Storage options:** Beyond the variant-dependent eMMC or SPI flash, the board accepts MicroSD cards and includes a UFS module socket, an interface uncommon in this SBC segment.
- **Expansion interfaces:** A 16-pin FFC connector exposes PCIe lanes, multiplexed with DisplayPort, alongside the standard 40-pin GPIO header; power is delivered via 5V/4A USB-C or optional PoE.

## Why it matters
The BPI-M8 enters a crowded field of Allwinner A733 boards including the ArmSoM Sige6, Orange Pi 4 Pro, and Radxa Cubie A7A, with differentiation primarily around PCIe connector choice and pricing. For Linux users and developers, the absence of published source code or OS images is a significant limitation, particularly given the historically uneven mainline support for Allwinner platforms; prospective buyers should weigh the hardware specifications against the current software availability gap.