Pine64 has announced that its Quartz64 Single Board Computer is finally available, taking the opportunity to present a new system-on-module (SoM) based on the same design, called SOQuartz. The company said last February that the Quartz64-A model would be equipped with a Rockchip RK3566 SoC, a large set of ports and between 2 and 8 GB of LPDDR4 memory in a device measuring 133x80x19 mm.
Pine64 does not offer any Quartz64 models with 2GB of RAM at launch, but 4GB ($ 60) and 8GB ($ 80) variants are available. For now, we don't know when the 2GB one should hit the market. The Quartz64-B model should arrive "in the next few months". The latter will present a BL-602 RISC-V 802.11n module with BLE 5.0, currently in the open-sourcing phase, or an AP6256 802.11ac Wifi + Bluetooth 5.0.
Quartz64 has set the stage for a new SoM called SOQuartz. The new device should look awfully familiar to Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 owners.
The manufacturer has indeed stated:
On the bottom of the PCB you will find the now standard one hundred pin high density connectors of the sector. This means that it will be possible to use SOQuartz as a replacement for the most popular solution on the market.
Put simply, SOQuartz could be a replacement for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 as both will be based on the same connector, but hardware and software compatibility is still unknown currently. Pine64 said SOQuartz will include the RK3566 SoC, the Azurewave AW-CM256SM WiFi 802.11ac Bluetooth and WiFi module equipped with a U.FL antenna connector and will give the option to order it with soldered storage memories or eMMC modules.
SOQuartz appears to be in the prototyping phase. Pine64 did not offer further details on the SoM specs, nor on the expected release date or on the price.
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