Special Thanks
The Rock-Boards where generously sent to us by RS-Components. Besides the hardware donations no money and no contract have been exchanged.
Introduction
The Rock-Boards are interesting alternatives to the Raspberry PI family.
Rock5B
The Rock5B is a powerhouse in terms of performance, drawing up to 60W of power, making it ineligible for the low-power computer category. However, with such a significant power consumption in a compact space, proper cooling considerations become essential.
The Rock5B boasts up to 16GB of LPDDR4 memory and is equipped with an Octa-core ARM processor, leaving little to be desired in terms of performance. Radxa had announced plans for a 24GB model set to release in Q1 2023, but it appears that this version has not been launched yet.
The I/O is equally impressive, highlights are:
- 2.5 Gbit/s Networking
- 4 Display Outputs (HDMI 8k/60, HDMI 4k/60, DP 4k/60 and MIPI DSI)
- micro HDMI input 4k/60
- 2x M.2 PCIe Slots
- eMMC Slot
The integrated Mali G610MC4 GPU supports:
- OpenGL ES1.1, ES2.0, and ES3.2
- OpenCL 1.1, 1.2 and 2.2
- Vulkan 1.1 and 1.2
- Embedded high performance 2D image acceleration module
Getting Started/easy Setup:
The RockPi5 can be powered by the USB-C Port utilizing PD 2.0 (60W). We used an off-the shelf Laptop Power-Supply for that purpose. The first boot must be via a micro-SD Card. We flashed one with armbian and followed the Getting-Started Guide on wiki.radxa.com.