The industrial grade computing board to boost AI On The Edge!
Presenting UP Xtreme, our very first Intel® Core™ platform from the UP family. With a measure of just 120mm x 122mm, UP Xtreme delivers a comprehensive set of features and I/O which allows you to reach astonishing performance rates of up to 4.6GHz and turbo clock frequency in just 15W.
With UP Xtreme we have consolidated the best I/O features from previous UP boards. The 40-pin GP-bus from UP board, mPCIe M.2 expansion from UP Squared and 100-pin expansion from UP Core Plus have all been utilized. Powered by Intel® 8th Core™ processors (code name: Whiskey Lake U), UP Xtreme is aimed at industrial, IoT, automation, robotics industries and much more. The addition of a 12-60V power input, a lockable power connector and TSN networking chip has enabled UP Xtreme to be expandable as well as industrial. UPscaling any application that needs more CPU power, memory capacity and rich I/O’s is all possible thanks to the extreme performance of UP Xtreme. Dubbed as the ferrari of the UP family, the power of UP Xtreme goes up to 4.6 Ghz, ensuring that you’ll never have to complain of having low CPU power. You’ll also never feel that it’s not smart enough as it is capable of expanding up to 6x Intel® Movidius™ Myriad X VPU. It boasts optional connectivity via WiFi, Bluetooth, LTE and LoRA. The possibilities are stretched to the extreme.
* Kickstarter rewards will be shipped with i7-8665U/ Core i5-8365U, as UP team got promotional price on these. The specification is exactly the same as i7-8665UE/ Core i5-8365UE.
When this 15 watt 8th Gen Core processor was introduced at Intel roadmap, our team got excited. Finally we have a ultra low power processor to fit in to a small form factor. Our ambition is always to utilize all signal available on SoC and continue all the best features from previous UP family, and this Intel® 8th Gen Core processor gives us the possibility to design a more industrial oriented product. Besides shock-vibration proof and industrial operation temperature, the following industrial features are highlights of UP Xtreme.
-Configurable serial ports & multiple I/O
– TSN for Real-time networking support
– onboard MCU for motor control
– 12-60V DC power input
Focus has been placed on the expandability of UP Xtreme. Users will have an ease of choice with already available modules on the market that can serve their specific needs or they will be able to easily take advantage of existing carrier boards from the UP family.
– When following the pin definition of 40-pin I/O expansions for Raspberry Pi HAT, they will work on UP Xtreme without any alterations required.
– With the 100 pin high speed expansion for UP AI Edge carrier boards, we’ve created various carrier boards for UP Core Plus, such as NetPlus, Vision Plus X, and AI Plus. Net Plus is a carrier board with 4x i210/i211 Ethernet Chip whereas Vision Plus X is a carrier board with 3x Myriad X and mPCIe slot and AI Plus is a carrier board with Intel Cyclone 10gx FPGA.
Remark: the existing carrier boards are designed for UP Core Plus, some signals may not be available when it is used with UP Xtreme. Please check the function tables below.
Even though we have designed for expandability, you still have the freedom to design a carrier board fit to purpose by following the design guidelines
There’s wide range of modules in the M.2 2230, M.2 2280, mPCIe form factors for connectivity (WiFi, Bluetooth, LTE), storage or a different purpose. AI Core X and AI Core XM 2280 can be used for AI inference.
Are you going to run multi neural network on the UP Xtreme? Get access of the power among CPU, GPU and VPU via Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit. UP Xtreme is a perfect platform to work with multi-VPUs. You can always start from no VPU, then gradually adding different expansion card to optimize the hardware requirements.
At UP we fully understand that the challenges in technology are not only found in topology but also in the integration and migration towards AI and IoT. Over the past 3 years, the UP team has built an extensive ecosystem in various landscapes from different vertical markets. Today we have a complete AI and IoT landscape in silicon, connectivity, CSP, IoT and AI amongst others. For robotics we have partners dealing with sensors and simulations. When your project involves automation, our eco system is able to offer you partners in real-time software and field bus hardware. If your aim is at artificial intelligence you will have AI sofware and Cloud partners at your side, to help you bring out the best performance at the edge.
All software and validation processes are shared in UP WiKi. Troubleshooting is available at Open Forum and all technical data will be made available to download at UP Community. You never have to feel alone when undertaking new developments again – our ecosystem and community is on standby to help you at each step of the way.
Buy at UP shop, and sell at UP Shop. UP Shop is an online shop which users order from 1 piece to thousands pieces. We keep inventory in our Dutch warehouse and ship to more than 100 countries in the world. If you built something cool with UP family and would like to sell it via UP shop. Come to talk to us and we are happy to showcase products powered by UP in numerous events all over the world.
We plan to make UP Xtreme a fanless edge computing system. We have got our first engineering samples for thermal simulation. Once the thermal test completes, we will start our tooling process.
Our first engineering samples (EVT) proved successful enough to allow us to port BIOS and drivers to showcase UP Xtreme at Embedded World in Nuremberg earlier in 2019. Hardware was ready much earlier than software, hence, in the EVT sample we’re not able to use the resources in GPU and multiple I/O. Since then software development has been carried out and two weeks ago our design verification samples (DVT) were released.
We are proceeding towards functional verification, software validation and environment testing. If all is a success, the next step would be the production verification stage with those same hardware schematics. Our fingers are crossed!
About UP
UP is a brand founded by AAEON Technology Europe in 2015. The UP team is aiming to bring innovation in technology, business model, and integrated solution. With its agility, the UP team collaborate with market leaders in different vertical markets to bring integrated solutions and build a large online community to work closely with developers.
About AAEON:
Established in 1992, AAEON is one of the leading designers and manufacturers of advanced industrial and embedded computing platforms today. In 2011, AAEON became a member of the ASUS group, this enabled the company to further strengthen its leadership, access advanced technology from ASUS and grow its focus towards AI and IoT. AAEON has built a comprehensive AI & IoT ecosystem ranging from IHV, CSP, and ISV and continues to showcase many use cases in AI.
When working with AAEON, you gain access to hundreds of computing boards with validated software solutions. Apart from the off-shelf product range, a fully custom designed board is also made at your service!
Designing cutting edge computing solution is always a challenge. Every single detail must be checked and verified to be sure the deliverables are in line with the expectations we created to our backers. UP Xtreme is a piece of jewels because in such small area we condensed features typically included in big and bulky boards: this has a cost and brings a high risk of mistakes which we must prevent. The CPU has 16 high-frequency configurable ( PCI-E / USB 3.0 / SATA ) I/O and we have used and brought all of them out to guarantee the maximum experience to our users. At the same time, we need not only guarantee full functionality of them with all our expansions but also most of the commonly used module ( SSD, mPCIe, etc. ). Although the CPU is low power, unleashing the Turbo Frequency the CPU thermal design power can go up to 25 W and this is a challenge for our chassis design especially at industrial operating temperature ( -20~60 Celsius (°C) of environment temperature ). On the opposite side of the CPU there are all the I/O of the board and we envision that customers could plug in inference accelerators powered by multiple VPU; this creates a further challenge in the chassis design since we want to guarantee complete fan-less operation at a system level. We would like to deliver a unique experience to the users who want to leverage the 40-pin expansion and the 100-pin expansion and to do so we have to create stable libraries and Linux images. For the first time, we integrated a microcontroller which can deliver real-time analog IO capabilities which are very useful for robotics and potentially to enable CEC on the HDMI 4K video output. Right now we are still in the developping phase and not sure on the final outcome of it. We need our backers to support us in all this journey: we learned from our mistakes committed in previous projects and we are confident to reach our target and fulfill the expectations of our supporters but we need your help, your feedback, your patient to make it happen.
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We have selected embedded CPU from Intel, and we will make the product available to buy for 7 years.
The product will be made with RoHS and REACH compliant.
This is our 4th project at Kickstarter, and we keep our commitment to deliver. Even though there were some delays in the previous project due to technical challenges, we never doubt about the fulfillment. Our goal is to deliver the board to the market to work with developers on innovative projects.