Introduce ROCK 5B - ARM Desktop level SBC

#221

Igorp

This is not a attack, I am trying to help, sadly I suspect it will not be heard.

Armbians problems are many, but big tasks need a start somewhere, to get resolved.

Armbian is a good product and a company with a flawed business / operating model .

Armbiam has bad end user, customer relationship skills,.

Armbian has contemp very common in software programming due to how programmers have been taught, for for software, hardware end users, very common in software programming, due to how programmers have been taught.

Now I expect you disregard, dismiss, what I have written. I openly tell you I am no hardware, software engineer.

What use are my words? I am a fresh set of eyes, i see outside the box, way you are thinking in, You are to close to the problem, and to engrained, stuck in your way of operation.

Your outlook on the problems and your way of business needs to evolve to survive.

1 Like
#222

Can the onboard switches of the Rock5 be replaced with more normal mobo jumpers to enable wired switches and flexibility with cases :slight_smile:

#223

In business and in life you have to trust and sometimes people abuse that trust. No business model will save you from that.

#224

Looking so forward to this! :grinning: Can we support driver development somehow?
I hope there will also be a passive cooling case available at some point, then it would be perfect.

Btw: Any power consumption estimates for idle and full load?
Btw²: Is AES supported/accelerated by the chipset?

#225

I think its very Chicken & Egg with this one as apart from Rockchip EVB boards there is a lack of hardware to develop on.
Also much is dependent on Rockchip as they seem to be taking a proactive stance in driver development and guess people are waiting in the wings to see which way this proceeds.
Mali is Mesa work often by Collabora with there amazing panfrost work where in 2.2 its looking like we also have full 1.3 Vulkan and Vallhall is still being worked on but will be available in bleeding edge rolling releases.

The capabilities are in the datasheet and its what the SoC provides not radxa if working drivers are available.
Cnxsoft published the datasheet a while back https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/12/16/rockchip-rk3588-datasheet-sbc-coming-soon/

But datasheet is here https://www.cnx-software.com/pdf/Rockchip RK3588 Datasheet V0.1-20210727.pdf but in that article for now.

Secure System
 Embedded two cipher engine
 Support Link List Item (LLI) DMA transfer
 Support SHA-1, SHA-256/224, SHA-512/384, MD5, SM3 with hardware padding
 Support HMAC of SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512, MD5, SM3 with hardware padding
 Support AES-128, AES-192, AES-256 encrypt & decrypt cipher
 Support AES ECB/CBC/OFB/CFB/CTR/CTS/XTS/CCM/GCM/CBC-MAC/CMAC
mode
RK3588 Datasheet Rev 0.1
Copyright 2021 ©Rockchip Electronics Co., Ltd. 10
 Support SM4 ECB/CBC/OFB/CFB/CTR/CTS/XTS/CCM/GCM/CBC-MAC/CMAC
mode
 Support DES & TDES cipher, with ECB/CBC/OFB/CFB mode
 Support up to 4096 bits PKA mathematical operations for RSA/ECC/SM2
 Support generating random numbers
 Support keyladder to guarantee key secure
 Support data scrambling for all DDR types
 Support secure OTP
 Support secure debug
 Support secure DFT test
 Support secure OS
 Except CPU, the other masters in the SoC can also support security and nonsecurity mode by software-programmable
 Some slave components in SoC can only be addressed by security master and the
other slave components can be addressed by security master or non-security
master by software-programmable
 System SRAM(share memory), part of space is addressed only in security mode
 External DDR space can be divided into 16 parts, each part can be softwareprogrammable to be enabled by each master

1 Like
#226

More information about the board is in another topic

2 Likes
#227

How do you get notified that the board is available for purchase?

#228

Think just use https://shop.allnetchina.cn/collections/rock5-model-b/products/rock5-model-b and use the ‘email me when avail’ or keep checking announcements.

1 Like
#229

hello! can i still buy from ameridroid radxa?
i don’t see an european customer

P.S. if it was build in 14nm global foundries could be cheaper?
why moved to the latest ARM GPU and not old G78 with more cores instead only 4 of G610? (that can have up to 6?)

#230

The Mali 710 is the next gen up from the G78 with improvements all round of about 20% and from I can gather the 610 is a 710 limited to a max of 6 cores and that is about the only difference.
4 cores is probably about die space and maximising how many they can get on a wafer so looking like they opted for less cores but the faster generation but also there is a big ML improvement with the 710 so maybe that was attractive also.
12nm prob would be cheaper but it would have to run slower as the larger the process the more power they pull generally and think its the thermals that ultimately limit max freq in that die space.

You can not buy anywhere yet but you can still preorder and hope maybe it will be 2nd/3rd Quarter

1 Like
#231

done the preorder. :blush:
I’ve seen many YT videos about 4th gen that is faster than Pi4. So i’ve chosen this one.
Meanwhile can the developers start to produce a new IO board with integrated GPU?
Should be a good idea! I’m looking for a mali G78MP24.

#232

There is no comparison with Videocore VI & a G610 even a G31MP2 is considerably faster than what isn’t really a GPU its a video DSP running code and Raspberry have done an amazing job but its at the end of the road in terms of performance.

Videocore is Raspberries Achilles heel and maybe on there anniversary they may say where they will go next as the Pi4 cpu wise is pretty good but by todays standard VC6 is extremely poor.

HiSilicon Kirin 9000 5nm beast and definitely not any cheaper if you want a G78MP24 :slight_smile:

1 Like
#233

I desire Pi5/Rock5 with that GPU. Ok I’ll wait for 8cx gen 4.

is possible put a G610MP6 on next IO board for compute module to work GPUs on parallels?

#234

Mali as far as I know are always embedded in the SoC but the is a 6 TOPS NPU in the RK3588 which is more than the 4 TOPS Tensor chip in the Pixel 6 phones.
You can also get PCIe accelerators and even though the RK3588 does have a resizable BAR I am not sure if GPUs will work as think its only dumb non bios cards.

In tensorflow you can partition a model by layers to delegates so guess if you get the partitioning right then you could use GPU, CPU & NPU concurrently on a single model.

#235

It is interesting that during the delay of the RK3588 it went from a Mali G57 based GPU (“ARM Natt GPU” from their early 2020 roadmap, https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/02/01/rockchip-rk3566-rk3588-rv1109-socs-coming-in-2020-based-on-rockchip-processor-roadmap/) to a latest-gen G610 based GPU (Odin). It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes Alyssa and the rest of the Collabora folks to bring up Panfrost on this new GPU architecture. Availability of boards like the ROCK5 will help immensely and with initial G57 patches landing in Panfrost now, maybe we won’t be in for too long of a wait.

I have to admit that I’m wishing the RK3588 also got a CPU upgrade to Cortex-A78s (or Cortex-X1 :stuck_out_tongue: ), but at least the A76s we get are kitted out with the max config of 512KB of L2 cache rather than the 256KB we see when the core is used as the mid-core in a mobile cluster.

2 Likes
#236

I think its going to be a strange situation as Collabora seem to be progressing quite well with vallhall.
I don’t think there is much architecture change from the previous gen if none and just optimisation.
There isn’t a single entry for rk3588 in the latest kernel and all tests we have seen are android based.
So we might have mesa drivers before a basic linux image as not sure what Rockchip have as a BSP.

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?h=v5.17-rc4&qt=grep&q=rk3588

It would be interesting if there is any basic news on a Linux bringup status

#237

I’m no graphics engineer, but it sounds like there were a few big changes with this third generation of Valhall especially with the introduction of the Command Stream Frontend. Apparently this also introduces GPU firmware. Open source purists’ dislike of blobs aside I’m not sure what that means for adding support to an open source driver like Panfrost…

Agreed! It would be great if there was a page or thread covering the Linux bring up process. Wink Wink Radxa :smiley:

#238

This feels like the wrong place to ask but…

Does anyone have any experience buying from AllnetChina and shipping to the US? Does doing so incur import duty that must be paid by the buyer, and if so how much would it be for the $139 16GB model ? Looking at shipping costs for other SBCs I’m guesstimating that it would be ~ $20 - $25 to get the board stateside. Does that sound plausible?

I’m trying to work out how much Allnet would come to vs Ameridroid. Allnet is actually charging Radxa’s quoted $189/$139, but Ameridroid lists the 16GB model for $220/170 :confused:

#239

RockPi4 is $13.97 to ship to Louisiana economy shipping, $29.68 DHL express.
If its like the UK Allnet is cheaper the problems is with returns and that if a local distributor becomes preferential.
I sort wing things in that I am testing and not going to return items and Allnet prices suit me.

#240

Dunno as not sure what a command stream frontend is or implies as there has always been a command stream what the ‘front end’ does differently I dunno.
The speed Alyssa & crew got to work with 1st & 2nd gen Valhall especially as test with just a virtual testbed and whilst querying from Android was nothing short of amazing.
The knowledge, experience and tools they have built up along the path of Mali’s evolution is unsurpassed and I have been reading in awe at how Alyssa is porting the Apple M1 for https://asahilinux.org/about/ and we all know how friendly Apple are to reverse engineering.

I don’t know how much sales speak is in the new command stream front end its just the godlike reverse engineering Collabora seem capable of makes me feel it could be pretty soon as likely if the changes where huge the G710 would be a 1st gen of a new architecture unless they are running short on naming :slight_smile:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16694/arm-announces-new-malig710-g610-g510-g310-mobile-gpu-families/2