Coming soon – Snapdragon 660 Based Inforce 6560 SBC

Coming soon from Inforce is a Single Board Computer based on the Qualcomm® Snapdragon 660™ core. The Inforce 6560™ SBC will be made available in the standard pico-iTX form factor without compromising on direct access to an extensive set of I/Os including USB-C with UltraHD display capability. This platform can be a replacement for Inforce 6540 SBC and an upgrade from the Inforce 6410P SBC which have reached end-of-life. Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ suite of SoCs are known to provide systems capable of high quality encode and decode, immersive AR/VR and security. The Snapdragon 660 SoC integrates the Kryo™ 260 CPU, Adreno™ 512 GPU, Hexagon™ 680 DSP and the Spectra™ 160 camera image signal processing (ISP).

• • Qualcomm brings their custom Kryo CPU core to the 600-tier for the first time on the Snapdragon 660 SoC and uses the 14 nm FinFET manufacturing process to achieve lower active power dissipation and faster performance. The Kryo 64-bit custom CPU is a combination of four ARM V-8 compliant cores (performance cluster) and four ARM V-8 compliant cores (efficiency cluster).

• • The custom designed Adreno GPU architecture provides high definition graphics while introducing general-purpose compute (GPGPU) co-processing for exceptionally low power consumption. The GPU supports graphics and compute APIs including OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 2.0 and Vulkan standards. Vulkan minimizes driver overhead and enables multi-threaded performance.

• • The 14-bit Qualcomm Spectra camera ISP unit enables hardware accelerated encode in UltraHD (4K) resolution in HEVC and other video compression standards.

• The Hexagon™ 680 DSP includes Hexagon Vector eXtensions (HVX) that are designed to support deep learning frameworks for machine learning and image processing.

Inforce Computing has delivered four generations of Snapdragon SoC-based embedded computing solutions partnering with Qualcomm. In continuation of its strong product roadmap, Inforce’s latest SBC combines Snapdragon 660’s excellent hardware architecture with home-grown efficient software solutions to provide a complete 4K encode/decode system.

• • The USB-C connector on this SBC runs on the USB 3.1 protocol and can support UltraHD display via the DisplayPort protocol. This allows one to connect to and power a native DisplayPort, MHL, or HDMI device with the proper adapter and cables! The USB-C interface simplifies connectivity and increases reliability with a symmetrical reversible connector.

• • Dual concurrent rendering of independent content is enabled from software by Inforce and resolutions of WQXGA@60Hz + UltraHD@30Hz are possible.

• • The Inforce 6560 SBC will have three MIPI-CSI camera connectors that support 4 lanes each. Each of these interfaces can support up to 24MP single camera or 16MP dual camera. Dual concurrent encode capability is possible with software from Inforce.

• Inforce enables product creators to execute deep neural networks on this device through the Qualcomm Snapdragon software accelerated runtime SDK. The CPU computations related to real-time media and sensor processing can be offloaded to the Hexagon DSP. To enable this offload, Inforce's software allows the use of the Hexagon SDK that enables a RPC mechanism (FastRPC) between the OS and Hexagon DSP.

These heterogeneous compute capabilities of the Inforce 6560 platform provide product makers the tools to easily migrate intelligence from the cloud to the edge. The flexibility to offload tasks across the various cores also opens up vast opportunities for audio, video and sensor analytics, which can be used across connected cameras, home hubs, drones/robotics and XR as well as industrial IoT and smart cities. Our engineers are currently lab testing an Android Oreo BSP for this new product. Pre-orders will begin soon. Stay tuned for more details on this exciting product!