radxa News - CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

March 27, 2025March 26, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Radxa CM3J industrial-grade Rockchip RK3568J SoM is compatible with Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4

Radxa CM3J is a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 compatible SoM powered by a Rockchip RK3568J industrial-grade quad-core Cortex-A55 SoC and equipped with up to 8GB LPDDR4x and up to 256GB eMMC flash. It’s an update to the Radxa CM3 based on the Rockchip RK3566 SoC with an industrial temperature range and only two board-to-board connectors, and can also be viewed as a cost-down version of the Radxa CM3i with RK3568 and four B2B connectors. It competes directly against the industrial-grade Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 introduced at the beginning of this month. Radxa CM3J specifications compared to the Radxa CM3 and Raspberry Pi CM4: The Radxa CM3J has been tested with the official Raspberry Pi CM4 IO Board, WaveShare CM4‑POE‑UPS‑BASE, WaveShare CM4‑IO‑BASE‑B, and WaveShare CM4‑NANO‑B, but other carrier boards for the Compute Module 4 may also be supported. Like with other such modules, there’s no 100% pin compatibility with […]

March 25, 2025March 25, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Linux 6.14 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architecture

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.14 on LKML: So it’s early Monday morning (well – early for me, I’m not really a morning person), and I’d love to have some good excuse for why I didn’t do the 6.14 release yesterday on my regular Sunday afternoon release schedule. I’d like to say that some important last-minute thing came up and delayed things. But no. It’s just pure incompetence. Because absolutely nothing last-minute happened yesterday, and I was just clearing up some unrelated things in order to be ready for the merge window. And in the process just entirely forgot to actually ever cut the release. D’oh. So yes, a little delayed for no good reason at all, and obviously that means that the merge window has opened. No rest for the wicked (or the incompetent). Below is the shortlog for the last week. It’s nice and […]

March 11, 2025March 12, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Review of SunFounder 10.1-inch touchscreen display for SBCs using Raspberry Pi 5 and Radxa ROCK 5B

SunFounder 10.1-inch RPI Touchscreen Display Review

SunFounder has just sent us one of their 10.1-inch touchscreen display designed for single board computers (SBCs) for review. It supports the Raspberry Pi family, but not only, thanks to a flexible design that allows mounting all sorts of boards with mounting holes that fit within an 85x70mm area. All you need is a board with HDMI output, a spare USB port for the touchscreen, and 5V USB-C input (up to 5A). So I’ll first test the SunFounder 10.1-inch touchscreen display with a Raspberry Pi 5 (85x56mm), then a larger Radxa ROCK 5 Model B Pico-ITX SBC (100 x 72mm). Since the display can also be used as an external touchscreen monitor, I’ll also try it with my laptop in Ubuntu 24.04 and Windows 11. SunFounder 10.1-inch touchscreen display specifications Key features and specifications: Display Type – IPS LCD Resolution – 1280×800 (16:10 aspect ratio) Touchscreen – 10-point capacitive Viewing […]

March 3, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

Software progress and source code release for CIX P1 Armv9 SoC and Orion O6 motherboard

When the Orion O6 mini-ITX motherboard with a CIX P1 12-core Armv9 SoC was announced in December 2024, we were told binary releases would start on January 15, 2025, and the source code would be released later in Q1 2025. Tom Cubie further explained that upstreaming of the CIX kernel would start in Q2 of 2025, and Linux 6.1 with Device Tree plus Linux 6.6 with ACPI would be supported in the meantime. I’ve been able to quickly check the Debian 12 binary release on the Orion O6 motherboard at the end of January, but as I was looking for an updated image for the second part of the review, I noticed there weren’t any new Debian 12 images so far. That does not mean there haven’t been any work done, as the forums are somewhat active and I’ve been told Radxa is even more active on Discord, although I […]

February 25, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 28 Comments

Armbian v25.2 and DietPi v9.11 released with updated Ubuntu and Debian-based Linux images for single board computers

Vendor-provided Linux images for single board computers are not always working optimally, so this post is a regular reminder that users may want to check out Armbian and DietPi projects mostly supported by the community but also backed by some of the vendors who offload some (repackaging) software work to them. Armbian and DietPi are separate projects, but this month, Armbian v25.2 and DietPi v9.11 were almost released simultaneously. I don’t report on each release (should I?), but they release an update every few months. The last time we had a look at both projects was in September 2024 for the releases of DietPi 9.7 and Armbian 24.8. Let’s see what the new releases have to bring. Armbian v25.2 Main changes: New Boards – Rock 2A and 2F, NanoPi R3S, Retroid Pocket RP5, RPMini, Rock 5T, GenBook, MKS-PI, SKIPR, Armsom CM5, NextThing C.H.I.P, Magicsee C400 Plus Rockchip 3588 Improvements – […]

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) - 20 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, 2025March 3, 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 […]