rockchip News - Page 17 of 22 - CNX Software

June 25, 2014September 6, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 71 Comments

List of Rockchip RK3288 Android TV Boxes So Far

In the previous years, you’d normally learn about new devices as they get listed on Alibaba or Aliexpress, and that’s how I built my – now very incomplete – list of Rockchip RK3188 based devices. But now companies seem to be anxious to let people know about their new devices even before they hit the market, and albeit I’ve been told full production of Rokchip RK3288 powered Android TV boxes is only planned by the end of July, many companies are already showing off their new devices, even though only the PCBA may be ready, or in development. Let’s go through the list of Rockchip RK3288 quad core Cortex A17 media devices that’s known (to me) so far: No brand D368 – HDMI 1.4 TV dongle with 1 or 2 GB RAM, 4, 8 or 16 GB flash, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n/ac + (optional) Bluetooth, and 2x USB host ports. No […]

June 19, 2014June 19, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Development Board with Intel Technology Developed by Rockchip

Just a quick post to show an interesting, yet unavailable development board. A few weeks ago, Intel and Rockchip announced a collaboration to design Intel Atom Sofia x86 SoC for mobile devices. Apparently, they did not waste any time, and have already done some nice work together, as Chen Feng, VP at Rockchip, posted the picture of the development board on his weibo account with a short description that Google’s translate as: You can now showed up, Intel inside, the world’s most highly integrated 6321 smartphones and tablet communications solutions, dual-core WCDMA SOC, integrated WIFI BT GPS PMU, all two chips It’s not entirely clear if it’s directly related to the announced Intel Atom “Sofia” using 3G (WCDMA) however. The 6321 is a dual core processor, but Rockchip and Intel only announced working on quad core processors, so this may be a separate product for example an ARM SoC with […]

May 28, 2014May 28, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

Rockchip to Design Intel x86 “SoFIA” SoCs for Android Tablets

Intel has just announced it has entered into a strategic agreement with Rockchip to design Intel-branded SoC platform for entry-level Android tablets. The Chinese SoC vendor will design two quad core tablet SoC one with 3G and one with LTE, which will part of Intel’s SoFIA mobile SoC platforms for Android mobile devices. Intel will bring Intel Atom and 3G/LTE modem IP, and Rockchip will work in the integration and overall design. The 3G model should become available in the first half of 2015 and target entry-level and value tablets, and the LTE version is also scheduled for H1 2015. That’s about all that’s been disclosed for now, and we don’t know for example which GPU will be part of these SoCs. Here’s what Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO, had to say about the agreement: The strategic agreement with Rockchip is an example of Intel’s commitment to take pragmatic and different […]

May 25, 2014September 24, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

How to Upgrade Firmware for Rockchip RK3066, RK3188, RK3328, RK3288, RK3399 Devices with the Command Line in Linux

Previously I wrote an article entitled “How to Flash Rockchip RK3066 / RK3188 Firmware in Linux” explaining how to use a graphical tool called RkFlashKit to upgrade firmware on Rockchip devices using a Linux computer. This tool had some limitations, and it would just have a subset of features of RkAndroidTool (Windows), and it was not possible to flash “update.img” type of firmware which are often provided and flashed with RkBatchTool in Windows. Luckily there’s now a command line tool called upgrade_tool that allows you to flash the “update.img” firmware files directly from Linux. I’ve already shown how to use it with Radxa Rock, but it’s buried with other instructions, so I’ve decided to make a separate post. This has been tested in Ubuntu 14.04 with Radxa Rock (RK3188) and Measy U2C (RK3066). Ready? Let’s start by downloading and extracting upgrade_tool. You may want to add the installation path to […]

May 21, 2014May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

ARM Cortex A15/A17 SoCs Comparison – Nvidia Tegra K1 vs Samsung Exynos 5422 vs Rockchip RK3288 vs AllWinner A80

We’re now starting to get quite a few players with ARM Cortex A15 cores on the market, as well as some with ARM Cortex A17. So a comparison table of different quad and octa SoCs might be a useful thing to do. I’ve put aside SoCs such as HiSilicon K3V3, and OMAP5, and focused on the four latest processors: Nvidia Tegra K1 (32-bit), Samsung Exynos 5422, Rockchip RK3288 and AllWinner A80. I haven’t included Mediatek MT6595 and Qualcomm SnapDragon 805, because the two companies mainly focus on smartphones and tablets (although it appears to be slowly changing for Qualcomm), documentation is usually difficult or impossible to find, and in the case of Qualcomm they use their own ARMv7 Krait cores. I’ve highlighted some features in green, in case a particular SoC appears to have an edge. Rockchip RK3288 AllWinner A80 Nvidia Tegra K1 Samsung Exynos 5422 CPU 4x ARM Cortex-A17 […]

April 23, 2014April 23, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

Linux Kernel Source Code and Chromium OS Overlay for Rockchip RK3288

A few days ago, we’ve seen Chromium OS running on Rockchip RK3288 development platform. I’ve been informed the source code could have already been released via the newly registered rkchrome github account with Linux kernel 3.10.30 and the overlay files to build Chromium OS for RK3288. There’s also a u-boot repository but it is currently empty. This Linux kernel can also boot Rockchip RK3188 based Radxa Rock development board, but more tests are needed to see if it’s really usable. I’ll have a look at the Linux kernel, and try to build it, and leave the Chromium OS part for later or other people. Let’s retrieve the source code:

git clone https://github.com/rkchrome/kernel.git
cd kernel

1 2	git clone https://github.com/rkchrome/kernel.git cd kernel

We’ve got two kernel config files related to Rockchip in arch/arm/config:

ls arch/arm/configs/ | grep rock
rockchip_chromium_defconfig
rockchip_defconfig

ls arch/arm/configs/ | grep rock

rockchip_chromium_defconfig

rockchip_defconfig

But since this is a recent 3.10 kernel with support for Flattened Device Tree support, and multi-platform support, there’s not much to be seen in these files, and […]

April 14, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Rockchip RK3288 based Android and Chromium OS Tablets and TV Boxes (Video)

After the first RK3288 Android TV boxes started to be promoted on Alibaba, and the first RK3288 board was shown, Rockchip is currently showing their quad core Cortex A17 processor in reference designs, tablets, and TV boxes running Android or Chromium OS at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair. Charbax interviewed the company, and the first demo was a development board connected to an LCD display running Chromium OS, which is said to handle 30 tabs without issues. Rockchip RK3288 is now advertised as being a quad core Cortex A17 with a Mali-T764 GPU, but when Rockchip representative was asked, he strangely denied to comment on whether it was a Cortex A12 or A17, as both are very similar. He also said the GPU was a Mali-T760MP4… If this seems all confusing that’s because it is… Some interesting things are H.265/HEVC support for 4K2K videos, and HDMI 2.0 for 4K @ […]

April 1, 2014April 1, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Official Android 4.4 Firmware for RK3188T HDMI TV Sticks Released

At the very end of last year, a beta Android 4.4.2 firmware for Rockchip RK3188 mini PCs was released, and yesterday, GeekBuying announced an official Android 4.4.2 firmware for Rockchip RK3188T (notice the T) mini PCs with AP6210 Wi-Fi modules,with bug fixes from the beta version. This should work with device such as MK908II and MK809III. There are at least two caveats however. First, I understand it will only work on RK3188T, not RK3188, and hopefully an official RK3188 mini PC firmware will be released soon, but since manufacturers may have changed from RK3188 to RK3188T for the same model during manufacturing, you have to make sure which version you are using. You can do so by installing CheckRK3188 app on your device, and check if you have the slower RK3188T SoC, or the older, but faster RK3188. The second issue is that Google Apps (Play store, gmail) are not pre-installed. You […]