IEI announced a “KINO-DH310” Mini-ITX board and a rugged “FLEX-BX200-Q370” box PC, both with 8th Gen “Coffee Lake” CPUs. The box PC ships with optional PCIe cards for AI acceleration.

We’ve already seen a lot of COM Express modules based on Intel’s 8th Gen “Coffee Lake” CPUs, and now we’re starting to see boards and systems. IEI just launched three Coffee Lake products — the KINO-DH310Mini-ITX board and “FLEX-BX200-Q370” embedded PC, covered below, as well as an IMBA-Q370 ATX board you can check out on your own. The FLEX-BX200-Q370, which provides optional AI accelerator boards, uses neither of the other boards as a mainboard.

KINO-DH310 (left) and FLEX-BX200-Q370
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All the products offer the same choice of 8th Gen Core i7/i5/i3 and Celeron, and Pentium processors with 35W or 65W TDPs and LGA1151 packages. A few 35W TDP T-series models are specifically noted, including the star of the show: the up to 2.4GHz (4.6GHz turbo) Core i7-8700T with 6x 14nm Coffee Lake cores and 12x threads. The hexa-core i5-8500T and quad-core i3-8100T are both single threaded.

There’s also a dual-core, quad-threaded Pentium Gold G5400T model that’s new to LinuxGizmos with an up to 3.1GHz clock speed. The chips include Intel HD Graphics Gen9 with 16 execution units and support for DX11.3/12, OpenGL 4.3/4.4/4.5, and OpenCL1.2/2.0/2.1. None of the systems list OS support, but 64-bit Linux and Windows should feel right at home.

 
KINO-DH310

The 170 x 170mm KINO-DH310 is a full-height Mini-ITX board with a commercial 0 to 60ºC range, but it can serve many embedded as well as consumer applications. We include it here because its among the first Coffee Lake Mini-ITX boards that aren’t primarily aimed at gaming. Others include Commell’s LV-67X. (Commell just announced an LV-67W model that appears to be identical to the LV-67X except that it has a BGA1440 socket for Coffee Lake H-series CPUs instead of an LGA1151 socket.)

KINO-DH310 detail view
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The KINO-DH310 has an Intel H310 I/O chipset and offers dual SODIMM slots for up to 64GB of 2666/2400MHz DDR4. Power consumption is said to run at [email protected] with 16GB DDR4.

Dual SATA III ports are onboard along with 2x GbE, 4x USB 3.0, and 2x RS-232 ports. Internal connections include 4x USB 2.0, 8-bit DIO, and single I2C, KB/MS, SMBus, RS-232, and RS-422/485 interfaces.

For media, you’re limited to dual display support with two HDMI 1.4 ports supporting 1920 x 1080 @ 60Hz. However, there’s an optional, internal DisplayPort with 4096 x 2304 @ 60Hz support. Three audio jacks are driven by a Realtek ALC662 codec.

The KINO-DH310 offers expansion features including a PCIe x16 slot, a PCIe-only M.2 M-key (2280) slot, and a PCIe/USB enable M.2 A-key (2230) slot. LEDs and various buttons are also available

 
FLEX-BX200-Q370

With its 4x SATA bays and 4x full-size PCIe slots, the 357 x 230 x 88mm FLEX-BX200-Q370 seems as much like a desktop PC as an embedded system. We thought it might be of interest, however, because it offers ruggedization features like -20°C ~ 50°C support (with SSD), shock resistance described as “10G acceleration part to part (11ms),” and vibration resistance spec’d out as “5~17Hz, 0.1 double amplitude displacement 17~640Hz 1.5G acceleration peak to peak.”

FLEX-BX200-Q370, front and back
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The FLEX-BX200-Q370 is also notable for being billed as an AI development system, with optional AI acceleration cards available for the PCIe slots. The options include boards that run Nvidia TensorRT, which can also be found on the Nvidia Jetson TX2, and Intel’s OpenVINO AI development toolkit, which is also available on the Movidius 2-equipped UP Squared AI Vision Kit. There’s also an option for the Qnap QuAI machine learning engine.


FLEX-BX200-Q370 diagram showing AI options (left) and optional AI add-on cards
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The diagrams above point to six optional PCIe cards including Mustang-F100 FPGA and Mustang-V100F-MX8 VPU boards. The Mustang boards, whose names reflect vintage Ford cars, do not appear to be documented. As shown in the diagram below, the FLEX-BX200-Q370 offers dual PCIe 3.0 x16 (x8 signal) full-size slots and dual PCIe 3.0 x4 (x4 signal) slots for low-profile cards.


FLEX-BX200-Q370 PCIe slots
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Unlike the Intel H310 equipped KINO-DH310, the FLEX-BX200-Q370 computer uses a higher end Intel Q370 I/O chipset. It supports up to 64GB of dual-channel, 2666/2400MHz DDR4, and the 4x 2.5-inch SATA III bays provide RAID 0/1/5/10 support. There’s also an M.2 2280 socket for PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 cards such as an NVMe SSD.

The FLEX-BX200-Q370 is further equipped with 2x GbE, 6x USB 3.0, and 2x RS-232 DB9 ports. An HDMI 1.4 port supports 4096 x 2160 p24 resolution, and there’s an option for dual, 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3 (USB Type-C) ports for DisplayPort and USB devices. Dual audio jacks are also onboard.

In addition to offering wall- and rackmount options, the computer can be turned into an AiO panel PC by attaching it with custom connectors to optional IEI touchscreens ranging from 15 to 24 inches. A 250W power supply is available, as well as an optional 350W supply. A watchdog timer is also available.

 
Further information

No pricing or availability information was provided for the KINO-DH310 Mini-ITX board or FLEX-BX200-Q370 box PC. More information may be found in IEI Technologies’ Coffee Lake products announcement and FLEX-BX200-Q370 announcement, as well as its KINO-DH310 and FLEX-BX200-Q370 product pages. The KINO-DH310 is also available in Europe from ICP IEI.