Radxa ROCK 5 ITX RK3588 mini-ITX motherboard review – Building an Arm PC and NAS with Debian KDE

ROCK 5 ITX Review: Build Arm Computer NAS

In this review, I’ll show how I installed Debian on the ROCK 5 ITX mini-ITX motherboard powered by a Rockchip RK3588 octa-core Arm Cortex-A76/A55 processor, before building a computer/NAS with the Arm mini-ITX motherboard, testing various features and running benchmarks. In the first part of the review, we checked out the Radxa ROCK 5 ITX (Arm) and Jupiter (RISC-V) mini-ITX motherboards with specifications and unboxing, and the Auriga 6-Bay NAS mini-ITX chassis used in this review. I already built the computer with the Jupiter RISC-V mini-ITX motherboard, so here I simply switched the RISC-V motherboard with the Radxa ROCK 5 ITX Arm motherboard and installed a few SATA drives. Radxa ROCK 5 ITX first boot – A tricky start… Radxa provides getting started instructions on the documentation website which I mostly follow to hopefully boot within a few minutes. I had to prepare the hardware first. So I installed a […]

CrowView Note Review – A 14-inch laptop shell designed for Raspberry Pi 5 and Jetson Nano Developer kit

Elecrow CrowView Note review

Elecrow CrowView Note is a laptop shell with a 14-inch Full HD display, an 84-key QWERTY keyboard with a touchpad, built-in speakers and microphone, and a 5,000 mAh battery that’s specially designed for the Raspberry Pi 5 and the Jetson Nano Developer Kit thanks to adapters. However, it can be used with any machine with either a full-featured USB-C port or spare USB and HDMI ports. So it works with any Raspberry Pi model, Windows, Mac OS, or Linux computers, Android smartphones, PS4/PS5 game consoles, and more. This type of laptop shell has been around for years with the first one being the Laptop shell for the Motorola Atrix 4G smartphone introduced in 2011, and more recently Nexdock launched a range of laptop shells such as the Neckdock XL 15.6-inch touchscreen display and wireless charging. The CrowView Note differentiates itself with its low price and direct compatibility with the Raspberry […]

Luckfox Pico Mini – A tiny Arm Linux camera board based on Rockchip RV1103 SoC with 64MB on-chip RAM

Luckfox Pico Mini A microSD card

Luckfox Pico Mini is a tiny (28 x 21 mm) board based on the Rockchip RV1103 Cortex-A7 camera SoC with a built-in 0.5 TOPS NPU, 64MB on-chip DDR2 RAM, USB-C port for power and data, two rows of headers with up to seventeen GPIOs, and five castellated holes for Ethernet. Two versions are offered: the Pico Mini A with a microSD card slot or the Pico Mini B with an extra 128MB SPI NAND flash. Both boards are a shorter version of the Luckfox Pico with similar features but additional GPIOs and the Luckfox Pico Plus model also adds an RJ45 Ethernet port. Luckfox Pico Mini A and B specifications: SoC – Rockchip RV1103 SoC CPU – Arm Cortex-A7 processor @ 1.2GHz + RISC-V core Memory – 64MB DDR2 NPU – 0.5 TOPS NPU with support for INT4, INT8, and INT16 ISP – 4M @ 30 fps ISP Storage MicroSD […]

Radxa ROCK E20C “Mini Network Titan” features 2.0 GHz Rockchip RK3528A SoC, dual GbE, metal case

Radxa ROCK E20C router

Radxa ROCK E20C, also “dubbed Mini Network Titan”, is a router with dual Gigabit Ethernet, a USB 2.0 host port, and a microSD card slot powered by a Rockchip RK3528A quad-core Cortex-A53 processor clocked at 2.0 GHz. Housed in a CNC aluminum alloy case, the ultra-compact fanless router is offered with 1GB to 4GB LPDDR4 memory, 8GB to 32GB eMMC flash, and also exposes two USB-C ports, one for power and the other for serial console access without having to tear down the device. Radxa ROCK E20C specifications: Processor – Rockchip RK3528A CPU – Quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 @ 2.0 GHz GPU – Arm Mali-G450 GPU with support for OpenGL ES1.1, ES2.0, and OpenVG 1.1 APIs VPU H.264, H.265, and AVS2 decoder up to 4Kp60 H.264 and H.265 encoder up to 1080p60 NPU – 1 TOPS NPU (TBC) Memory – 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB LPDDR4 Storage 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB eMMC flash […]

Firefly EC-R3576PC FD is an Embedded Large-Model Computer based on Rockchip RK3576 processor

Firefly RK3576 Embedded Large Model Computer

Firefly EC-R3576PC FD is described as an “Embedded Large-Model Computer” powered by a Rockchip RK3576 octa-core Cortex-A72/A53 processor with a 6 TOPS NPU and supporting large language models (LLMs) such as Gemma-2B, LlaMa2-7B, ChatGLM3-6B, or Qwen1.5-1.8B. It looks to be based on the ROC-RK3576-PC SBC we covered a few weeks ago, and also designed for LLM. But the EC-R3576PC FD is a turnkey solution that will work out of the box and should deliver decent performance now that the RKLLM toolkit has been released with NPU acceleration. However, note there are some caveats doing that on RK3576 instead of RK3588 that we’ll discuss below. Firefly EC-R3576PC FD specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3576 CPU 4x Cortex-A72 cores at 2.2GHz, four Cortex-A53 cores at 1.8GHz Arm Cortex-M0 MCU at 400MHz GPU – ARM Mali-G52 MC3 GPU clocked at 1GHz with support for OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0, and 3.2, OpenCL up to 2.0, and […]

Akeana unveils 10 RISC-V cores suitable for microcontrollers up to data center chips

Chip Diagram Akeana 5000

Founded about three years ago, Akeana has just officially launched and announced three 32-bit and 64-bit RISC-V processor lines and SoC IP with the Akeana 100 series for 32-bit microcontrollers, the Akeana 1000 series for 64-bit processors with MMU, and the Akeana 5000 series with much higher single-thread performance and designed for laptops, data centers, and cloud infrastructure. The company also introduced Scalable Coherent Interconnect, Interrupt Controller, and IOMMU IP for building out compute subsystems based on the aforementioned RISC-V cores,  as well as AI-targeted Vector RISC-V Cores and Matrix Computation IP. The design team is said to have previously worked on Marvell’s ThunderX2 server chips. Akeana 100 Series The Akeana 100 Series is a line of highly configurable processors with 32-bit RISC-V cores that support applications from embedded microcontrollers to edge gateways, to personal computing devices. Four Akeana 100 RISC-V cores are available Akeana 110 for area- and power-constrained […]

Mixtile Edge 2 Kit review with Home Assistant, 2-in-1 Zigbee & Z-Wave mPCIe module

Mixtile Edge2 Kit Review with Home Assistant

We received the Edge 2 Kit IoT gateway on the Rockchip RK3568-powered Edge2 single board computer (SBC) and a 2-in-1 Zigbee and Z-Wave mPCIe card from Mixtile which we will be reviewing from the perspective of smart home applications using Home Assistant open-source home automation framework. Let’s dive into the details. Unboxing Mixtile Edge 2 Kit CNX Software previously reported on the Mixtile Edge 2 Kit in 2022 and you can check the detailed specifications and block diagram in that earlier article. Since then, Mixtile has found a wider range of applications for the device and is also promoting it as an Edge AI Box that performs AI object detection using the Edge 2 Kit (or the more powerful Mixtile Blade 3) using the built-in NPU (Neural Processing Unit) with up to 1 TOPS of AI performance for tasks such as object detection. Let’s unbox it and take a closer […]

Efinix introduces the low-power Topaz RISC-V SoC FPGA family for “high-volume, mass-market applications”

Efinix Topaz RISC-V SoC FPGA

Efinix Topaz is a new low-power RISC-V SoC FPGA family manufactured with the same 16nm TSMC process as the Efinix Titanium SoC FPGA, but optimized for high-performance in a low-power footprint, and targetting high-volume, mass-market applications. The Topaz SoC FPGAs provide fewer features than the Titanium family but still offer up to four RISC-V hard cores, PCIe Gen3, MIPI interfaces, LPDDR4, LVDS, and 12.5 Gbps transmitter with most features being optional and depending on the exact SKUs selected. Efinix Topaz key features and specifications: FPGA compute fabric Up to 326,080 logic elements (LEs) Up to 19.22 Mbits embedded memory Up to 1,877 10-Kbit SRAM blocks Up to 1,008 embedded DSP blocks Memory – 10-kbit high-speed, embedded SRAM, configurable as single-port RAM, simple dual-port RAM, true dual-port RAM, or ROM FPGA interface blocks Optional 32-bit quad-core hardened RISC-V block (RISCV32I with M, A, C, F, and D extensions and six pipeline […]

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EmbeddedTS embedded systems design