radxa News - Page 2 of 16 - CNX Software

August 16, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 17 Comments

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

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 […]

July 27, 2024July 27, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 22 Comments

Upgraded Radxa ROCK 5B+ SBC gets LPDDR5 memory, eMMC flash, WiFi 6, two M.2 M-Key sockets, 4G LTE/5G support, and more

The Radxa ROCK 5B+ (“ROCK 5B Plus”) is an upgrade to the Rockchip RK3588-powered ROCK 5B Pico-ITX SBC with the same form factor but various changes including a switch from LPDDR4x to LPDDR5, optional built-in eMMC flash, and an onboard WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 module instead of one connected through an M.2 Key-E connector. Other changes include replacing the M.2 Key-M PCIe Gen 3 x4 socket with two M.2 Key-M PCIe Gen3 x2 sockets, adding a SIM card slot and M.2 Key-B socket for 4G LTE or 5G cellular connectivity, adding an extra USB-C port for power only (was multiplexed with USB-C Display Port connected in ROCK 5B), and the HDMI input relies on a full-size HDMI port instead of a micro HDMI port. Other small changes can be found in the specifications below with differences highlighted in bold and strikethrough. Radxa ROCK 5B+ specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3588 […]

July 25, 2024August 18, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 42 Comments

Building a workstation with Radxa ROCK 5 ITX (Arm) or Milk-V Jupiter (RISC-V) mini-ITX motherboard – Part 1: The hardware

Milk-V Jupiter ROCK 5 ITX mini ITX NAS enclosure

Radxa ROCK 5 ITX is a mini-ITX motherboard powered by a Rockchip RK3588 octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 processor, and the Shenzhen Milk-V Jupiter is another mini-ITX motherboard, but based on SpacemIT K1 octa-core 64-bit RISC-V processor instead. When Radxa contacted me about reviewing those, I thought it would be interesting to review a complete kit with a mini-ITX case since I had never built this type of system myself. Yesterday, I was surprised to receive two large packages and thought maybe a company sent me a 3D printer or laser engraver kit, but instead, I got one package with the two Arm and RISC-V mini-ITX motherboards and another with a mini-ITX NAS enclosure with 6x SATA bays. Radxa ROCK 5 ITX unboxing Let’s look at the ROCK 5 ITX motherboard and accessories first. The motherboard ships with a rear panel and two screws for the M.2 module. The motherboard features the Rorkchip […]

July 19, 2024July 20, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 36 Comments

Radxa X4 low-cost, credit card-sized Intel N100 SBC goes for $60 and up

Radxa X4 is a credit card-sized Intel Processor N100 single board computer (SBC) that costs almost the same as a Raspberry Pi 5 with the 4GB RAM model going for about $60 and the 8GB RAM variant around $80. The x86 SBC offers many of the same features as the Raspberry Pi 5 including dual micro HDMI output, four USB 3.2/2.0 ports, Ethernet and WiFi networking, and the 40-pin GPIO header handled through a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller. Networking is better with 2.5GbE and WiFi 6, M.2 SSD support is built-in and four to eight times faster compared to PCIe HAT for the Pi 5, and the USB 3.2 ports are capable of 10 Gbps speed. So let’s little not too like, and the main downside is the lack of MIPI CSI and DSI connectors for projects requiring those camera and display interfaces. Radxa X4 specifications: SoC – Intel Processor […]

July 18, 2024July 17, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

Panthor open-source driver achieves OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance with Arm Mali-G610 GPU (RK3588 SoC)

Panthor OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance Mali G610

Collabora has just announced that the Panthor open-source GPU kernel driver for third-generation Arm Valhall GPUs (Arm Mali-G310, Mali-G510, Mali-G610, and Mali-G710) has now achieved OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance with the Arm Mali-G610 GPU found in the Rockchip RK3588 SoC. Just a few days ago, Linux 6.10 was released with “support for Mali CSF-based GPUs found on recent Arm SoCs from Rockchip or Mediatek”, as expected from the earlier article entitled “Panthor open-source driver for Arm Mali-G310, Mali-G510, Mali-G610, and Mali-G710 GPUs to be part of Linux 6.10” published last March. But this did not say anything about the level of support for the Valhall GPU since it’s common for new hardware to be added with minimal support, and OpenGL ES 3.1 compliance means it’s ready for business… Collabora’s announcement explains this was tested on a Radxa Rock 5B single board computer: The conformance tests ran on a Rock5b board […]

July 15, 2024July 15, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Rockchip RKLLM toolkit released for NPU-accelerated large language models on RK3588, RK3588S, RK3576 SoCs

Rockchip RKLLM toolkit (also known as rknn-llm) is a software stack used to deploy generative AI models to Rockchip RK3588, RK3588S, or RK3576 SoC using the built-in NPU with 6 TOPS of AI performance. We previously tested LLM’s on Rockchip RK3588 SBC using the Mali G610 GPU, and expected NPU support to come soon. A post on X by Orange Pi notified us that the RKLLM software stack had been released and worked on Orange Pi 5 family of single board computers and the Orange Pi CM5 system-on-module. The Orange Pi 5 Pro‘s user manual provides instructions on page 433 of the 616-page document, but Radxa has similar instructions on their wiki explaining how to use RKLLM and deploy LLM to Rockchip RK3588(S) boards. The stable version of the RKNN-LLM was released in May 2024 and currently supports the following models: TinyLLAMA 1.1B Qwen 1.8B Qwen2 0.5B Phi-2 2.7B Phi-3 […]

July 15, 2024July 16, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Linux 6.10 Release – Notable changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 6.10 on LKML: So the final week was perhaps not quote as quiet as the preceding ones, which I don’t love – but it also wasn’t noisy enough to warrant an extra rc. And much of the noise this last week was bcachefs again (with netfs a close second), so it was all pretty compartmentalized. In fact, about a third of the patch for the last week was filesystem-related (there were also some btrfs latency fixes and other noise), which is unusual, but none of it looks particularly scary. Another third was drivers, and the rest is “random”. Anyway, this obviously means that the merge window for 6.11 opens up tomorrow. Let’s see how that goes, with much of Europe probably making ready for summer vacation. And the shortlog below is – as always – just the last week, not some kind […]

June 29, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

RAUC open-source OTA update solution for embedded Linux ported to Rock Pi 4 SBC

RAUC open-source OTA update solution enabling A/B updates for embedded Linux images has recently been ported to the Radxa Rock Pi 4 Model B SBC powered by a Rockchip OP1 SoC by the project’s maintainer, Leon Anavi working for Konsulto Group. If you run a Linux distribution like Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora, packages and OS images are taken care of automatically or by running a few commands. However, software engineers who build custom embedded Linux images with the Yocto Project or Buildroot must handle this themselves. Luckily, there are already open-source OTA firmware update solutions such as Mender, Balena, Torizon, OSTree, Snap, or RAUC, and we’ll look at the latter today. RAUC (Robust Auto-Update Controller) was started by Pengutronix in 2015 and eventually adopted by the community. It’s a lightweight update client that runs on an Embedded Linux device and controls the A/B update procedure when a new firmware revision […]