Announcing the ROCK 5C: Power, Performance, and Versatility for Just $30

That looks good !!

Sorry for the off-top, but ā€œisā€ or ā€œwill beā€? I donā€™t see it anywhere.

I am curious if the decoders are dual core, since it is 8k i think it must be dual core, but u never know, rockchip is like a box of chocolate

@hipboi any news about rk3528 based rock 3 or something? I am more interested low ower, low cpu , high media capable thingsā€¦

Better than the current Rock 5B ?

This is quite off-topic, for RK3528, we have two SBCs:

  • ROCK 2A, which is Pi form factor, with Pi PCIe connector and USB 3 mux, starting at 15$ with 1GB ram and WiFi 6/BT5
  • Radxa E20C, dual GbE router with RK3528, openWRT is running
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yes, 5B+ is better than the current 5B. I think our advertising words would be ā€œthe best SBC just got betterā€.

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We will start another thread to update this.

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Currently the PCIe is hardware split, your ideas is good, itā€™s possible on the hardware and software, we can just add a pcie mux for the other two lanes. But from our current schedule, there is no time to change, we want to introduce it to the community as soon as possible. Expected in May.

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What is the differences between Rock 5B and Rock 5C? What is the CPU performance of RK3588S2 compared to RK3588? Does Rock 5B/5C supports simultaneous 5Gbps operation just like Raspberry Pi 5?

Iā€™d definitely buy if you could make one for the Rock 5A.
Hopefully it will be a metal case, which is very helpful for heat dissipation.

Are you referring to USB3 at SuperSpeed? If yes, on Rock 5B it is verified that USB3 port do not have to share bandwidth just as on RPi 5B but there performance is lower even with appropriate settings (the defaults the RPi people chose are maybe there to hide the insanely high idle consumption of RPi 5B)

And as I understand it the USB3 IP blocks in RK3588S2/RK3582 are the same as on RK3588 and the USB3 ports also independent. Main difference between RK3588 (5B) and all the other RK358x variants is the former having several PCIe Gen3 lanes available while the others have only PCIe Gen2 pinmuxed with USB3/SATA.

Anything changed regarding ethernet port? Orange Pi and Freindly elec managed to wire two ethernets, is this possible here?
Also easy thing to do would be to add UART debug port, this makes live much easier :slight_smile:

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So far most users will get nvme hat to get good i/o with pcie3 speed and this is obviously worst than just standard m.2 port already on board. Small 2230 nvme drives are really cheap now, especially those from upgraded laptops, and they are usually 4x3.0, much faster than sd cards, right now limited by most sbc boards but this will change in future. FPC rpi5 connector is just one lane, officially pcie 2, but capable of pcie 3. Of course they can put two of those in rpi6, but we just already have great standard of m.2, with up to 4x lanes.

If the idea is to do cheaper pi5 board with this ecosystem then I think it would be much better to replicate all ports and dimensions of original board. Same port layout, same connectors. For now POE header is pi4 style, big (of course better) hdmi. Ecosystem is not just that fpc port location but also ability to use all fitted cases with their heatsinks etc. This may be hard to achieve but for users very useful to switch from one to another without any pain :wink: I remember when I expected that I can try my quad sata board with Rock pi 4 and I found out that all holes, ports are offset at about 1-2mm. This was realy frustrating :wink:
If You really want to use something from pi then it should be same in dimensions as much as possible.

Of course I understand that this will make some accessories not compatible, like POE hatā€¦ I would just release new version with POE header removable and attachable to two locations for both pi4 an pi5.

My use case is not desktop, but headless boards with power efficient resources, fast, durable i/o (nvme) and ethernet (no wireless). This class of users looks for something, let say for home assistant service - small, power efficient server. Others runs NAS but this require different ports, usually SATA and much power.
Of course Iā€™ll take a look at 5B+, it looks promising. 5D would be good idea if there is something more regarding pcie lanes than just one poor 2.1 lane. If new Rockchips are defective RK3588 then maybe there are some with 4x pcie 3.0? This will make 5D interesting and obviously pi5 fpc there is bad idea.

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I think in this case, ROCK 5 ITX would be your choice, dual 2.5G ethernets, fanless and standard mini itx form factor.

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shut up and take my money !
Iā€™d be happy to see one extra 2.5G ethernet port and also builtin microphone and IR like OPI 5+ has

Nice specs! Canā€™t wait to try it out! 64GB RAM would be nice

Mini ITX is way bigger than Pico ITX, about 4-6x and require bigger power supply. Iā€™ll take a look at it when itā€™s released, but usually I was able to stick much more power efficient resource than with this format. Probably it will be great for NAS where You have to use big power supply for disks.

Why? No need to use an inefficient and ā€˜biggerā€™ ATX supply since DC-IN (12V) is also possible:

https://docs.radxa.com/en/assets/images/rock5itx-interface-overview-1266d3c0b4e745372a48a473d78c3cdc.webp

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Lets wait for final product and its power requirements, usually itā€™s just much more than smaller boards and You may need 12V + 5V for sata.

@hipboi looks super exciting, especially if m.2 m key slots are farther apart from each other and allow to place an m.2 to minipcie adapter in each!

Would also love an additional ethernet port even if it was 1G, but guess thatā€™s too much to ask given all SoCā€™s interfaces are probably already utilizedā€¦