powerful rock chip (opens in new tab) The RK3588 chipset is back again (opens in new tab), this time in the form of ROCK 5 boards from OKdo and Radxa. It claims to be the first his SBC to support 8k60 video output.
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The RK3588 packs eight Arm cores together like other boards like the Raspberry Pi 4. (opens in new tab), there are only four. It has a quad-core 2.4 GHz Cortex A76 unit that provides processing power and his four Cortex 1.8 GHz A55 cores for efficiency and background tasks. Add in this 8 GB of RAM and a Mali G610MC4 GPU (not sure how many cores, but 6 is the max) and you have a board that can tackle a wide variety of tasks.
| SoCs | Rock chip RK3588 |
| processor | Arm DynamIQ (Quad Cortex – A76 @ 2.2/2.4GHz, Quad Cortex – A55 @ 1.8GHz) |
| GPUs | Arm Mali G610MC4 GPU, OpenGL® ES1.1, ES2.0 and ES3.2, OpenCL® 1.1, 1.2 and 2.2, Vulkan® 1.1 and 1.2 support, built-in high performance 2D image acceleration module |
| memory | 8GB 64-bit LPDDR4 RAM |
| Power | USB Type-C PD version 2.0, 9V/2A, 12V/2A, 15V/2A, 20V/2A. 5V supply applied to GPIO pins 2 & 4. |
| HDMI | Dual HDMI ports supporting displays with resolutions up to 8Kp60 and 4Kp60 |
| row 6 – cell 0 | Micro-HDMI input port supporting up to 4Kp60 resolution |
| GPIOs | 40-pin GPIOs |
| row 8 – cell 0 | 2 x UART, 2 x SPI bus, 2 x I2C bus, 1 x PCM/I2S, 1 x SPDIF, 1 x PWM, 1 x ADC, 6 x GPIO, 2 x 5V DC power input/output, 2 x 3.3V power out. |
| USB | 2x USB2 host ports |
| row 10 – cell 0 | 1x USB3 host port |
| Row 11 – Cell 0 | 1x USB3 OTG/Host Port |
| depository | Micro SD/eMMC |
| size | 100.15×74.25mm |
Dotted around the edge of the board are a series of ports including a pair of full size HDMI (for 8k60 output), a single micro HDMI (4k60) and 4x USB-A (2x USB 2 and 2x USB 3). port. Additionally, it has a headphone jack and a USB-C port for power. The board itself needs 24W, and 36W with the SSD installed. It has a 2.5G Ethernet port, 40-pin GPIO, CSI and DSI MIPI, two UART interfaces, Micro SD and eMMC storage options, and PCIe 3.0 (NVMe compatible) and PCIe 2.1 interfaces for M.2 SSDs. Supports SATA. It even has an on/off switch.
Managing a small board is a lot of work, and various usual questionable operating systems such as Android 12 in addition to Debian and Ubuntu Linux help this task.
Sounds like the perfect board for games and video stations. Digital signage can also work well, especially if a lower power board doesn’t. ROCK 5 is exclusive Available from OKdo, is available for pre-order now and will arrive in stock within 14 days for $159. Hopefully some accessories will be available soon as well.
