Introduce ROCK 5B - ARM Desktop level SBC

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.

Money money money… Money!

I always think opensource generally has not grasped a good donation model as it misses the choice of expression that a purchase does.
With a donation you can have no dictate but you should be allowed to provide some metadata to your choice of preference and that is often missing from donation models.
Maybe the only dictate would be to display what preference metadata is currently trending but hey.

https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/x.org/

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I was poking fun at Igor, I usually put him on ignore other places. I don’t understand why the head of Armbian airs his monetary politics everywhere I see posts from him but it’s a reoccurring theme.

I do hope he finds a large corporation who will fully fund his work soon.

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Why would they cover for your need and greed?

Never use Armbian, but I did use OpenWRT before using their buildchain to build / customise my old router’s firmware in the past, which was a huge 8MB flash back in the day for a 200MHz MIPS. If Radxa may release something like that (or tutorial etc. with the necessary blobs) to build Debian and Android (AOSP seems to get a new version every year like iOS), that would be useful already. And I didn’t pay anything to them thus far :sweat_smile:

For graphics, I found that ARM has a page…

And this is the driver for the G610 architecture. But it also say, to build OpenGL ES etc. driver it requires a commercial license so to access Mali GPU DDK. So I guess when Rock 5 is released, it would have display (2D, HDMI/DP) support but not 3D for anything not distributed in Rockchip provided SDK.

All Mesa drivers have been reverse engineered without need of access to the Mali GPU DDK.
In fact it will not be touched as it has commercial licences so reverse engineering opensource versions is the only option.

This time its going to be strange as its likely the G610 Mesa drivers will be complete before Rockchip manage to provide a linux SDK as far as I know currently there is only an Android BSP working.
There is a new front end command stream with the G710 (G610 is a G710 limited to 6 cores max) that Arm are saying is radically new architecture. I am thinking that might contain a large dollop of sales speak as hoping so as usually something that radical would cause a name change to identify a different architecture.
I think how the earlier gens Valhall was an incremental step up from previous so will be the G710.
Fingers crossed but either way the RK3588 is very hot off the press and the biggest problem currently is Rockchip getting up to speed with a Linux BSP.

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Erm… HE is the HEAD?! And here I was expecting that he is just high ranked engineer… Ultimately this behavior is not something i expected from head person…

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I highly respect family, friends, customers, … forum trolling, racketeering, pirating, abuse in general … ? Not much sympathy.

See? We are very much the same. I hope.

I think there is no issue having both open source and blob driver to co-exist, just like the official Nvidia driver. In terms of architecture I think changing from (in AMD’s context) VLIW to GCN to RDNA are radical changes, but perhaps ARM one is not like that (no underneath ISA change), so they may keep using Mali? Or it could also be treated as brand name like “Radeon”.

Yes, I think RK3588 based SBC would be very interesting because its score is like on par with my Mac mini 2012 that I’m typing this reply on. In terms of GPU performance it could be even better, though I guess even the power consumption is on par (my Mac consumes ~40W).

If i could, i would, instead of relying on x86 boards, i just don’t make enough money for it.

Mali is the brand means tiny or something and I think the Mali-400 is the most numerous GPU in the world.
Its sort of different than AMD / Nvidia who provide drivers for there products which Arm doesn’t or likely will ever.
They create SDKs for implementers to create drivers that often end up being hardware specific the only reason blob drivers exist is because AMD & Nvidia supply versions that way but no-one in a Linux context will entertain closed source blobs.
Its like the M1 that is currently being reverse engineered for Linux Apple has no interest so a Linux blob from apple will just not be a thing but its still no problem even if they are beginning to find some strange quirks with the m1.

Rockchip might provide a Mali driver being a implementer but they might just focus on android / chromeos and guess its if they think there is a market, so far Android looks the sole focus.
There is no issue having both opensource and blob drivers if you opt in for non open source options but with Mali those blobs may not even exist or need hacky API bridges to convert what might be a binary for other purpose.
Which none of that really is a worry as it seems Collabora are romping ahead with full opensource Mesa drivers but so far I have not seen a single thing that looks like a Linux BSP for the RK3588 we have seen an Android one but that could be a very strong indication blob or opensource ignoring Mali is going to be a long haul.

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For China mainland users, you can reserve from here:

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thank you:grinning:

It would be great to have a keyboard as a case for the ROCK 5. Something similar to a Raspberry Pi 400 but cooler and a more solid build. :smiley:

It is now March, almost 2 full months since the January 9th announcement.

Is there any predictors for launch day yet?

Has there been any tweaks to the hardware or software? (things not posted in the rock 5 android part of the forum).

I already ordered my R3 codes, just waiting to put an actual order in. :smile:

We are not even in the 2nd quarter of announced release date of a pre order and thinking it will be nearer 3rd than 1st quarter.

When ROCK5B is shipping(expected Q2, 2022)