When the new Radxa Rock Lite was announced for $59 in September 2014, it was one of the most inexpensive quad core ARM Linux development board available on the market. But ODROID-C1 board in December 2014, and especially Raspberry Pi 2 board in February 2015 changed all that, as these two quad core boards sell for $35 before shipping and taxes. So the company has now decided to drop the price to $39 for the Radxa Rock Lite board.
Let’s remind us of Radxa Rock Lite specifications:
- SoC – Rockchip RK3188 ARM Cortex-A9 quad core @ 1.6Ghz + Mali-400 MP4 GPU
- System Memory – 1GB DDR3 @ 800Mhz
- Storage – micro-SD SDXC up to 128GB
- Video Output – HDMI 1.4 up to 1080p@60hz, and AV output. LVDS interface.
- Connectivity – 10/100M Ethernet port, WiFi 150Mbps 802.11b/g/n with antenna
- Audio I/O – Audio S/PDIF, headphone jack
- Camera – CSI interface
- USB – 2x USB 2.0 host port, micro USB OTG
- Debugging – Serial Console
- Misc – IR sensor, power key, recovery key, reset key, 3 LEDs, RTC
- Expansions Header – 80-pins including GPIO, I2C, SPI, Line in, USB 2.0, PWM, ADC, LCD, GPS… etc
The board can run various Linux based operating systems like Android 4.4, Ubuntu, Debian, and so on. 3D graphics acceleration should be supported in the desktop OSes, but video decoding has to rely on software decode, except in Android. The quad core Cortex A9 processor @ 1.6GHz will have much better performance than Broadcom BCM2836 quad core Cortex A7 (900 MHz) found in R-Pi 2, and even the Amlogic S805 quad core Cortex A5 (1.5GHz) found in ODROID-C1 that about 40% faster than R-Pi2. Rockchip RK3188 can deliver 16000 DMIPS, against 9420 DMIPS for Amlogic S805, and 6840 DMIPS for Broadcom BCM2836. So if your application require high integer or floating point performance, and/or Wi-Fi (built-in) / RTC or LVDS, Radxa Rock Lite might be a better deal. Bear in mind that the community should be quite smaller than for the other two boards.
Thanks to Freire for the tip.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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