That’s it! 2024 is almost over, and it’s time to reflect on what happened during the year. So I’ll look at the highlights of 2024, share some CNX Software website traffic statistics, and speculate on what may be ahead of us in 2025. Looking back at 2024 Raspberry Pi was super active this year with 22 product launches that included boards and modules like the Raspberry Pi 5 with 2GB RAM, Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and Pico 2 W, Raspberry Pi CM5, expansion modules like the Raspberry Pi AI camera, AI HAT+, and M.2 HAT+, new accessories such as the Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 and the Raspberry Pi Monitor, and the new Raspberry Pi 500 keyboard PC among others. As usual, there was also plenty of announcement of accessories from third parties, and some boards with the new Raspberry Pi RP2350 Arm/RISC-V microcontroller. There weren’t any ground-breaking Arm processors […]
Upcoming Rockchip RK3688 Armv9.3 AIoT processor to feature a 16 TOPS NPU, UFS 4.0 interface
Rockchip has unveiled the RK3688 AIoT SoC with Armv9.3 Cortex-A7xx cores delivering up to 250K DMIPS (RK3588 delivers 93K DMIPS), a 1 TFLOPS GPU, and a 16 TOPS NPU. The new processor succeeds the Rockchip RK3588 octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 first announced in 2019, and also features a 128-bit LPDDR4/4x/5 memory interface, and a UFS 4.0 storage interface. That’s about all we know about the RK3688 right now, but we can also deduct it’s probably based on a new, yet-to-be-announced Arm Cortex-A7xx core, possibly named Cortex-A730 or Cortex-A735, because no Arm cores have been announced with the Armv9.3 architectures. The Arm Cortex-A725 CPU core unveiled last May still relies on Armv9.2, and I’d expect new Arm cores to be introduced within the next few months unless Rockchip made a mistake in the presentation slide above. Two other platforms were also announced at the same time starting with a new entry-level/mid-range RK35XX octa-core […]