Rockchip RK3566 is a quad-core Cortex-A55 processor with plenty of peripherals designed for AIoT and NVR applications. While it still supports features like high-dynamic range or video post-processing, it’s not really optimized for TV boxes, but this has not stopped the maker of H96 Max “8K UltraHD” TV box to launch an RK3566 model with 4GB RAM and 8GB RAM now sold for respectively $59.99 and $76.99 on Banggood.
H96 Max RK3566 TV box specifications:
- SoC – Rockchip RK3566 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor with Arm Mali-G52 EE GPU, 0.8 TOPS NPU/AI accelerator
- System Memory / Storage configuration
- 4GB DDR3, 32GB eMMC flash, and MicroSD card
- 8GB DDR3, 64GB eMMC flash, and MicroSD card
- Video Output – HDMI 2.0a up to 4Kp60 with 3D support,
- Video decoding
- 4Kp60 H.264/H.265/VP9
- VC1 up to 1920 x 1080 @ 60fps
- MPEG-4 up to 1920 x 1080 @ 60fps
- HDR10 and HLG modes
- Audio – Optical S/PDIF output, digital audio output via HDMI,
- Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 4.0
- USB – 1x USB 3.0 port, 1x USB 2.0 port
- Misc – Power/standby LED,
- Power Supply – DC 5V/2A
- Certification – CE, FCC, ROHS
The TV box runs Android 11 with RKMC 18.1, Neflix, Vudu, Skype chatting, Picasa, Flicker, Youtube, Facebook pre-installed. Do not expect official Netflix Full HD/4K support on this device. It ships with a power adaptor, HDMI cable, user manual, and Bluetooth voice remote control by default. I’m not quite sure who needs a TV box with 8GB RAM, but if you do, it may be the first Arm-based TV box with that much memory.
Via AndroidPC.es
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.
Support CNX Software! Donate via cryptocurrencies, become a Patron on Patreon, or purchase goods on Amazon or Aliexpress
No AV1 decode in the RK3566. Nice RAM though, very epic.
I think I saw a similar fake branding of “6K” support on a recent box.
Typo: 1088 -> 1080.
“I’m not quite sure who needs a TV box with 8GB RAM”.
Mine with 3GB gets sluggish and I have to manually close apps. I imagine a number bigger than 4 would help.
From the Mecool KM6 Deluxe review on this very website, running Android TV 10: “I also sometimes noticed that the system got stuck for a few seconds. This doesn’t happen often but decreases the overall experience quality. When it got too bad I restarted the system and all was well again. It seems I’m always getting out of memory. If I’ve got this issue with the 4GB model, I would guess the 2GB version would easily get out of memory. With a fresh reboot, I’ve only got 2.28GB of free memory.” Throwing 8 GB at it might be an extreme… Read more »
> From the Mecool KM6 Deluxe review on this very website
Please keep in mind that this wasn’t a real review. The guy relied on a Windows tool that has been ported over to Android presenting a certain amount of ‘Available memory’ then renaming that to ‘free memory’. Maybe both AIDA64’s and the review’s author have a limited understanding of the Linux kernel’s virtual memory implementation?
Lovely, as some “smart” TVs ship with 1.5GB…
I’m also a big fan of getting twice as much RAM as everyone else for any device I get, it tends to make it still usable a few years later when new software assumes this is what everyone has. Having 8GB also means this can be a usable low-end PC replacement once distro kernels support the SoC well enough. I’d definitely take a device like this over a random developer board without a case, or over another TV box with a faster processor but less RAM. I’d love to see a box like this with the wifi module on an… Read more »
> wifi module on an m.2 card that can be replaced with an SSD
Good luck since neither key E nor A are suited for NVMe SSDs (key M and a handful B-M). And for adapters like https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08B3R5Y4G you’ll need to make huge openings into your TV box enclosure 😉
Indeed, I was confused there. I had previously seen hacks to add a second SSD to a laptop, but that must have been a B-Key WWAN modem slot then, not the WLAN slot.
But with adapter outside the case, we can install m.2 nvme SSD, or even something like 4-port SATA controller for a full-blown NAS! Beats most SBCs which still don’t include PCIe and/or enough SATA. And all we need is a tiny cut in the case for the ribbon!
Need to confirm that slot is PCIe, though. Some m.2 wifi cards are SDIO (e.g. stuff that goes into Rock Pi N10)…
I regular miss in these specs whether these boxes support AC3 audio passthrough via HDMI. This is essential if you want to connect an A/V-receiver which i guess is a very common use case for these boxes. After having a lot of bad experience with Win 10 and Mac OS I wonder how it works with Android. I never had probems with Raspberry Pi but it sucks in other areas. Has anyone experience with this?
Most manufacturers will not indicate this, except those that sells more expensive devices.
When I tested TV boxes two or three years ago, AC3 HDMI pass-through would work in most devices, meaning not all, but TrueHD and DTS HD were most of a problem.
It also depend on the app you’re going to use. My recommendations is you wait for a review for the TV box with a test of HDMI pass-through.
It’s incredible how android can be so unoptimized and full of crap, I think it is by far the most slow OS for phone I’ve ever seen. And I don’t see it’s going to disappear anytime soon in favour to something better, pitiful 🙁
Eh? I have no issues with phone. Maybe don’t buy a $100 phone?
>I think it is by far the most slow OS for phone I’ve ever seen
What other “OS for phone” do you have to compare with? Symbian?
It’s not so much the OS that’s to blame as the modern applications in general. Why browsing the web in 2021 with 4x4GHz and 16GB of RAM has to be much slower than it was in 96 on a 486DX2-66 with 16MB RAM using Netscape 2, often forcing me to kill the browser to stop “Web Content” from spinning ? Because web site developers have an infinite amount of resources to make their code run on (the visitors’ browsers) and trade efficiency for speed of development. Sadly this has become the norm in virtually any application nowadays, but fortunately the… Read more »
Pretty enticing offer honestly: The cheaper variant is on par with most TV boxes in their ”high end” out fit (4 GB RAM, 32 GB SSD). They usually have Amlogic S905X2/X3/X4 variants, so Cortex A55, but Mali G31 MP2. Upgrading the GPU to Mali G52 MP2 is wonderful and will provide a healthly performance boost since Mali G52 is the ”mid-end” mobile GPU on ARM 8 GB is definitely a novelty, in the same vein that you see Amlogic S905X3 based boxes that have a drive bay for 2 TB HDD for around the same price (75-90 bucks). A novelty… Read more »
Previous generation “tv box” SoCs didn’t support more than 4GB (3 GB on Allwinner A64).
I use Taskbar from the f-droid repository as my desktop-style launcher, which supports a start menu and windowed apps.
> The only minus would be the A55 cores – They are better than A53’s, but clearly not one of the ”big” A7X based cores. The A55 benefits from a much faster memory controller than the older ones and can easily run side-to-side with A72 or A73 on memory-bound workloads where latency counts. And when you factor in the frequency ratio you can have in a similar thermal envelope, it’s not that difficult to have a 2 GHz A55 run at comparable performance levels to an 1.5 GHz A72 for example. Just the CPU cores alone would deliver 5.3 vs… Read more »
The problem I see in practice is that the SoCs with the “little” A53 or A55 cores also tend to be much more limited in cache size and memory bandwith compared to higher-end SoCs that not just have faster cores but also larger caches and wider memory interfaces. The new rk3566 and the s905x both come with L1 I/D cache of 32KB each per core, no per-core L2 cache and a shared last-level cache of 512KB. This is the same layout as the ancient rk3188 with its Cortex-A9 cores. In the latest Snapdragon 888 by contrast, there are of course… Read more »
I generally agree with the points you made, but here we’re comparing cores more than whatever else can be changed around such as the cache. I tried on 3 of my machines to build haproxy-2.3.0 with gcc-7.5.0 in RAM with all available cores at the highest frequency (no throttling), here’s what I got: rpi4b (4xA72-2.0GHz): 83.8 seconds nanopi-m4 ([email protected] + [email protected]): 70.8 seconds VIM3L (4xA55 @1.9): 109.3s So the A55 is indeed slower than its competitors here but not that much (24% slower than RPi4b-2.0 GHz for GHz). This also means that it should slightly beat the RPi4b at stock… Read more »
Edit, VIM3L was polluted by “unattended upgrades” running in background at boot… 4 cores give 108s and 2 cores give 178s. Thus it’s almost as fast as the A72 in RK3399 clock-for-clock. The reason definitely is the RAM and cache speed. The L1 in the A55 is up to 50% faster than the one in the A72 here, and the RAM speed is twice as fast (kB/s per access type): vim3l:$ ~/ramlat -s size: 1x32 2x32 1x64 2x64 1xPTR 2xPTR 4xPTR 4k: 631722 632095 632174 631985 948417 632537 466908 8k: 632077 632373 630001 632355 948252 632349 466899 16k: 631460 631905 632149 631726 947609 631376 466556 32k: 607688 627943 618156 627786 941098 600215 433170 64k: 71676 61364 71246 61572 73023 61957 40453 128k: 63174 62039 63212 61845 67544 61981 35465 256k: 60082 60697 60499 60465 58124 52563 31090 512k: 7769 21127 23886 22841 21919 22347 14971 1024k: 8957 8858 9409 8816 9417 8712 5987 2048k: 8216 8035 7541 7503 7608 7579 5235 4096k: 7730 7502 7522 7506 7567 7535 5188 8192k: 7363 7162 7239 7251 7300 7248 5100 16384k: 7226 7030 7192 7072 6836 7152 4896 123456789101112131415 vim3l:$ ~/ramlat -s size: 1x32 2x32 1x64 2x64 1xPTR 2xPTR 4xPTR 4k: 631722 632095 632174 631985 948417 632537 466908 8k: 632077 632373 630001 632355 948252 632349 466899 16k: 631460 631905 632149 631726 947609 631376 466556 32k: 607688 627943 618156 627786 941098 600215 433170 64k: 71676 61364 71246 61572 73023 61957 40453 128k: 63174 62039 63212 61845 67544 61981 35465 256k: 60082 60697 60499 60465 58124 52563 31090 512k: 7769 21127 23886 22841 21919 22347 14971 1024k: 8957 8858 9409 8816 9417 8712 5987 2048k: 8216 8035 7541 7503 7608 7579 5235… Read more »
The designs of the boards and components used for Amlogic S905 D\ X3, X4 can make a large difference in results. As YouTube TV box testers, have shown. In speed results, Synthetic and real world.
Thanks for sharing the numbers, very interesting.
I see that the Raspberry Pi 4 in your tests has a much harder time scaling to more than two CPUs, i.e. it’s much faster in the two-core test than the other two, but only 30% faster when all cores are in use.
Yes, you definitely see that its memory bandwidth is severely limited and unsuitable for 4 cores. Comparatively, the RK3399 on single core suffers from some limitation, but its cores scale better because not all the available bandwidth is used by a single core. So I’d say that the RK3399 performs well when all its cores are running, but that it could perform much better with a single core than it actually does. I’ve been suspecting that they do this to leave a little bit of bandwidth to the 4 poor A53 there. These ones only have 64-bit read for 128-bit… Read more »
I’m curious with RK3566 power consumption vs s905x2~4 (22nm vs 12nm) at their best settings.
Sad to see the new HK1 ( RK3566 ) and the new A95X ( S905X4 ) have gone with colour leds. Would be better to spend the leds cost on better performance components..
Do you know if you can turn off the display?
i have the android box T95 Plus running android 11. I can seem to jailbreak or root it HELP any suggestions
i have the Android Box T95 Plus running 11.0 I simply want to jailbreak or Root it can anyone help