radxa News - CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

February 10, 2025February 10, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Radxa ROCK 5T SBC packs ROCK 5 ITX mini-ITX motherboard’s features onto a 110x80mm PCB

Radxa ROCK 5T is yet another Rockchip RK3588 SBC whose main selling point is to pack most features of the ROCK 5 ITX mini-ITX motherboard (170x170mm) into a much smaller 110x80mm board. The board features up to 32GB RAM, M.2 2280 sockets for NVMe SSDs, four independent display outputs via HDMI, USB-C, and MIPI DSI, HDMI input and camera interfaces, two 2.5GbE RJ45 jacks, on-board WiFi 6/6E and Bluetooth 5.x, and an M.2 Key-B socket for cellular connectivity. Radxa ROCK 5T specifications: (with differences highlighted in bold or strikethrough) SoC – Rockchip RK3588 or RK3588J (industrial grade) CPU – Octa-core processor with four Cortex-A76 cores @ up to 2.2 GHz (industrial) / 2.4 GHz (commercial), four Cortex-A55 cores @ up to 1.8 GHz GPU – Arm Mali G610MC4 GPU VPU 8Kp60 10-bit H.265 / VP9 / AVS2 / AV1 decoder, 8Kp30 H.264 decoder 8Kp30 H.265 / H.264 encoder AI accelerator […]

February 9, 2025February 9, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 16 Comments

DeepSeek shown to run on Rockchip RK3588 with AI acceleration at about 15 tokens/s

Rockchip RK3588 DeepSeek R1 NPU acceleration

DeepSeek R1 model was released a few weeks ago and Brian Roemmele claimed to run it locally on a Raspberry Pi at 200 tokens per second promising to release a Raspberry Pi image “as soon as all tests are complete”. He further explains the Raspberry Pi 5 had a few HATs including a Hailo AI accelerator, but that’s about all the information we have so far, and I assume he used the distilled model with 1.5 billion parameters. Jeff Geerling did his own tests with DeepSeek-R1 (Qwen 14B), but that was only on the CPU at 1.4 token/s, and he later installed an AMD W7700 graphics card on it for better performance. Other people made TinyZero models based on DeepSeekR1 optimized for Raspberry Pi, but that’s specific to countdown and multiplication tasks and still runs on the CPU only. So I was happy to finally see Radxa release instructions to […]

January 29, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 36 Comments

Radxa Orion O6 Review – Part 1: Unboxing, Debian 12 installation, and first benchmarks

Radxa sent me a sample of the Orion O6 mini-ITX motherboard for review. The system is powered by an CIX P1 (CD8180) 12-core Armv9 processor, equipped with 16GB RAM, and offers features like 5GbE, HDMI and DisplayPort, a PCIe Gen4 x16 slot, and more. It’s one of the most anticipated boards of the first part of 2025 since it’s powerful, offers a good performance/value ratio, and eventually promises to boot any ISO Arm64 image through an open-source BIOS / EDKII bootloader. I’ll start this review with an unboxing, NVMe SSD and WiFi module installation, and a short tutorial showing how to install Debian 12 operating systems before getting some system information and running a few benchmarks. In a few weeks, I’ll publish a more detailed review with features testing and more benchmarks to see what works and what doesn’t at this very early stage. Radxa Orion O6 unboxing I received […]

January 20, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Linux 6.13 Release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.13 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List: So nothing horrible or unexpected happened last week, so I’ve tagged and pushed out the final 6.13 release. It’s mostly some final driver fixes (gpu and networking dominating – normal), with some doc updates too. And various little stuff all over. The shortlog is appended for people who want to see the details (and, as always, it’s just the shortlog for the last week, the full 6.13 log is obviously much too big). With this, the merge window for 6.14 will obviously open tomorrow. I already have two dozen pull requests pending – thank you, you know who you are. Linus Release about two months ago, Linux 6.12 – the new LTS version – brought us real-time “PREEMPT_RT” support that had always required out-of-tree patchsets until now, the completion of the EEVDF (Earliest Eligible […]

January 4, 2025January 4, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 25 Comments

Radxa Cubie A5E – A compact Allwinner A527/T527 SBC with HDMI 2.0, dual GbE, WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.4

Radxa Cubie A5E is an SBC powered by Allwinner A527/T527 octa-core Cortex-A55 SoC and featuring HDMI 2.0, dual GbE, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4, an M.2 socket for NVMe SSD, USB 3.0 Type-A and USB 2.0 OTG (Type-C) ports, and a 40-pin GPIO form factor in a compact 69x56mm form factor. Long-time readers may remember the Allwinner A10-powered Cubieboard launched in 2012 as an alternative to the hard-to-get Raspberry Pi development board or the various TV boxes like the MeLE A1000 we tried to use to run Linux on Arm hardware. At the time, Allwinner SoCs became popular in SBCs but the company management eventually failed to deliver on software, so some members of CubieTech decided to split and founded Radxa to design Rockchip SBCs that looked more promising in terms of software support. It eventually ended up being a good move after a few difficult first years. However, Allwinner […]

December 21, 2024December 24, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 27 Comments

Rockchip RK3588 mainline Linux support – Current status and future work for 2025

The Rockchip RK3588 is one of the most popular Arm SoCs for single board computers, and while good progress has been made with regards to mainline u-boot and Linux support, the SoC is quite complex and it takes time to port all its features even though it was first teased in 2020 and the first Rockchip RK3588 SBCs were introduced in 2022. While the simpler Rockchip RK3566 and RK3568 SoCs are already fairly well supported in mainline Linux, more work is needed to upstream code, and as noted before in posts and comments here, Collabora keeps track of the status on Gitlab, and the company recently posted an article about the progress and future plans related to upstream Linux support for Rockchip RK3588. Rockchip RK3588 mainline Linux progress in 2024 Linux 6.7 kernel – Network support on the Radxa ROCK 5B using a 2.5GbE PCIe controller. Linux 6.8 kernel – […]

December 18, 2024December 20, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 55 Comments

Radxa Orion O6 mini-ITX motherboard is powered by Cix P1 12-core Armv9 SoC with a 30 TOPS AI accelerator

Radxa Orion 06 Armv9 mini ITX motherboard

Radxa Orion O6 is an Arm mini-ITX motherboard with performance similar to Apple M1 and Qualcomm 8cs Gen3 platform thanks to the Cix P1 12-core Armv9 processor with four Cortex-A720 cores clocked at 2.8 GHz, four Cortex-A720 cores at 2.4GHz, and four low-power Cortex-A520 cores clocked at 1.8 GHz. The Cix P1 SoC also features an Arm Immortalis-G720 GPU for graphics and AI computing, a 30 TOPS AI accelerator for a combined 45 TOPS of AI inference performance, an 8Kp60 video decoder, and an 8Kp30 video encoder. The Orion O6 SBC ships with up to 64GB LPDDR5, features a 4Kp60 HDMI 2.0 port, a 4Kp120 DP 1.4 connector, two 5Gbps Ethernet ports, M.2 socket for storage and wireless, a PCIe x16 slot, and more. Radxa Orion O6 specifications: SoC – Cix P1 (Codename: CD8180, not the CP8180 variant for AI PCs) 12-core DynamIQ processor 4x Cortex‑A720 big cores @ up […]

December 5, 2024December 6, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments

BredOS Arch Linux Arm distribution runs on Rockchip RK3588 single board computers

BredOS is a Linux distribution based on Arch Linux Arm and optimized to run on Rockchip RK3588/RK3588S single board computers (SBCs) with current support for 22 boards from Radxa, Orange Pi, Khadas, and others. Board vendors will usually provide OS images for their SBCs, but the quality and support may be limited, so projects like Armbian and DietPi are maintaining Ubuntu and/or Debian images for popular single board computers. But if you’re an Arch Linux (Arm) fan, there are fewer choices, and you may have to roll your own port for your board. BredOS provides an easy-to-use alternative based on Arch Arm Linux. BredOS highlights (provided by the developers): User-Friendly Interface – A simplified and intuitive user interface for easy navigation and use. Arch-Based – Built on top of Arch Linux, ensuring access to a vast repository of packages and a rolling release model. Arm Support – Optimized for Arm-based […]