Introduce ROCK 5B - ARM Desktop level SBC

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.

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:

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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?

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.

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.

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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

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:

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:

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.

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

Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks for the info!

Indeed! Alyssa and the other Collabora folks have done such amazing work for open source modern Mali support. I’m so glad they’re on the case :slight_smile:

Can I suggest an option for certain ‘pre-buyers’ that might cost them a bit more?


Dolby Vision Decoding

A board option that contains licenced Dolby Vision decoding at all layers, profiles, and FEL/MEL stuffs? With a ‘proper’ colour reproduction, too?


This is something that I know that the entire media player community is crying out for, and this board will undoubtedly be the most powerful piece out there … if it can playback all types of DV from as many major containers (m2ts, mp4, mkv, mp5?) as possible, then it go a long way to selling a LOT more boards.

Currently there is no one stop shop that can handle everything all in one place. A lot of us have been ripping our Blu-Rays to remux MP4 or MKV containers with HDR(10) fallback layers included, but nothing out there can display them properly and also handle high-bitrate sound, wether locally or streamed. This board could break that mould.

I’ve pre-ordered the top spec, but I’d pay an extra £20-30 more for the DV abilities I’ve mentioned above.

(i did a topic search on ‘dolby vision’ as as yet don’t see it here, apologies if this has been dealt with already)

What is known is that rk3588’s hardware can decode and display HDR10 video, but I don’t know the status of software support. Rockchip’s SDK seems still in early state. If you need mainline, you may need to wait further for mainline support offered by rockchip or collabora or someone else.

I have to agree about Dolby Vision even though this won’t happen.

The GPU issue really infuriates me, having great potential and not be able to just slap batocera on it. It’s not just radxa but also khadas, orange, maybe others, i’ve bought several boards with no gpu’s drivers, what infuriates me the most is that android phones and x86 boards have support on day 1, my question is always “how do i fund this directly?”. The answer is, i can’t.

Not sure what mean as all Mail up to G52 have working panfrost drivers if running mainline linux.
RockPi4 didn’t when it came out has now, Radxa zero from start apart from having to enable ‘glamor’.
Collabora are already working on Mesa drivers for Valhall and the big problem with the Rock5 is apart from an Android BSP there isn’t an image or even a single early entry in kernel.org as its completely new.
Android they are already showing benchmarks for GPU/CPU even vulkan but this time so far your going to be hard pushed to find a single working image than maybe a Rockchip BSP full of Rockchip blobs.

The problem with images is the kernel version they use as many of the mesa drivers need a minimum kernel release so if your kernel is old then nope no mesa drivers.
With batocera say Raspberry the kernel is 5.15 whilst other images are as old as 4.1.5 and really has nothing to do with the availability of GPU drivers its the image that batocera use and what is avail for the board.

GPU drivers for the Rock5 that has nothing but some Rockchip BSP images are likely to be of least concern for some time yet.

Working panfrost doesn’t necessarily mean stable.

I think the only one is the Rock3 which is sometimes referred to as a G52 little and its not unstable it just doesn’t have full openGL hardware support.
Panfrost is just the 3D driver but guess generally I don’t do extended tests but as Mesa has grown I have found what I have used to be stable.
If you find them unstable you should fire off some bug reports on the Mesa gitlab.

Ofc you can - hire a team and donate your work / money to community.