Thanks for a catch! Q3 starts soon, but still we can be suprised with earlier date or some delay. Some RK3588 boards are popping on Youtube as well as few interesting products coming (like mixtile). No big rush, I just need to plan that, carefully 
Introduce ROCK 5B - ARM Desktop level SBC
I doubt it as Raspberry are purely reactive and after the rk3588 has been released if it garners popularity then likely we will see a Pi5 maybe.
They have a huge problem though as a Pi5 will have to beak compatibility totally and as VC6 isnât scalable and currently they have no alternative. VC6 is basically some tweaks to VC4 which is purely a video DSP that is the bootloader of the Pi where what they might do as an only option is release with PCIe GPU compatibility.
There current range has been a huge success for them doubling sales and with Raspberry you can almost guarantee it will be later than sooner and have a hunch this year is far too soon.
If they also try to retain the $35 base model then we are a long, long time off.
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Any way to save USB type-c and power up the board through something else (battery pins or dc in connector)?
I am hoping that the release of the Rock5b is imminent. Very exciting times for single board computer lovers! Khadas released their latest version of the Vim. That board is cool I have the Vim3 pro and itâs been great. That said , the Rock5b is the board I ordered and the one I want
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Itâs nice to see some khadas upgrade, but Iâm really disappointed with its price and some of specs, they still use old cores what makes it almost two times slower than rk3588:
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/13973601?baseline=14170348
and NVME is still 1x lane (vs 4x on Rock 5 or Rock 4c+). Sure - nice to see upgrade from 4GB to 8GB, but yet again we will get 16GB on same price level with Rock5 (and we may see 32GB on this chip like with mixtile blade).
I have two khadas VIM3 pro and they are small and cute. Itâs perfectly sized board with best case and some unique features. I would buy new VIM at half of itâs price, but not much more. Itâs far behind expected rock5
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I am really interested in what price Radxa set for the Radxa-Zero2 as its basically a Vim3 and yeah $200 seems very steep for what is essentially just 2x extra GPU cores in the Vim4.
Khadas do some really nice gear but you can never say its cheapâŚ
The RK3588 is faster but you normally compare like for like to get meaningful results.
Your link has the RK3588 on a different version of test software, twice the memory and 64 bit Android of a different version. You call that like for like ?
Well, the people here are people who arenât interested in VIM4 or anything.
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Back in 2018, i thought it was a good idea to buy the VIM2 MAX because the Pi 3B did not have hardware acceleration for x265. Having 8 cores, 3 GB RAM with 64 GB eMMC i would be having no worries for at least 10 yearsâŚooh boy what was i wrong. I was running CoreElec and suddenly last year or in 2020 it was announced that CoreElec for VIM2 MAX would not receive big updates anymore because of Amlogic no longer supporting their S912 SOC. I was dumbfoundedâŚ
Khadas, has done a very good job with support etc, but if a company stops supporting their product well what can you say about it. Not much. I hope Rockchip will not do something similiar in just 1-2 years.
Itâs all we have now and both boards are under active development so both can improve those results. I just donât expect there is anything wrong with those results because new amlogic just added two old A53 cores when RK3588 upgraded all cores to A55/A76 and they are significantly faster and power efficient. I donât think there is anything wrong about those results, they will not change much. This is one of two disappointment about VIM4 - itâs like change from 6GB RAM to 8GB RAM compared to DDR3 vs DDR4
No no no. I own and use now two VIM3 Pro boards and when they were released it was something really exciting. VIM4 is way to expensive with slightly modified specs and double price of VIM3 Pro. In 2022 I would not buy any board with 1 lane NVMe when boards like Rock 4C+ have 4x and are available for $59.
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Amlogic never supported linux as they donât do opensource all there products as far as I know are behind a licence paywall.
It was baylibre who provided a large amount of the support https://baylibre.com/improved-amlogic-support-mainline-linux/
https://linux-meson.com/hardware.html
Amlogic didnât stop supporting as they never did its just the baylibre crew tried valiantly but never managed to reverse engineer hardware decoding and think that is just about the only thing that isnât supported in opensource.
That gets you stuck with binary blobs on an old kernel tree that may of come to an end.
You mean A55/A76?
yes, sorry for typo, Iâll edit if that is possible
And hereâs the BayLibre employee having done most of the work for mainlining Amlogic in the past talking about the chances for T7 getting mainline support anytime soon or at all: https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/05/07/khadas-vim4-review-part-2-android-11-preview-and-benchmarks/#comment-592259 (check the links to @chewitt posts in Khadas forum there as well).
While A311D (VIM3) and A311D2 (VIM4) sounds familiar theyâre from entirely different Amlogic SoC families (G12B vs. T7) and the latter has a much better internal design, especially much better memory performance which directly translates into more CPU horsepower even today when Amlogic boot BLOBs limit the A73 cores to 2.2 GHz (usually this will be lifted over time, with G12B the A73 started at 1.8 GHz and are now at 2.4GHz).
Doesnât change much wrt RK3588 which is much faster due to A76 cores being so much more modern and powerful compared to Amlogicâs A73 cores.
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I do agree. My vim3 pro was amazing when I first got it. I mean I was using a overclocked Rpi4 so it was definitely an upgrade. That 32 bit android image is obsolete in 2022. Absolutely nonsensical for khadas to release their upgraded vim4 but still have a 32 bit os! Insane
They can only release what Amlogic provides, and what they provide is a 32 bit Android for unknown reasonsâŚ
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Good to know. So i will boycott every SBC that ships with Amlogic SOC. I mean having a SBC, 90% if not more is or will be that you will be running something that is somehow associated with Linux. Be it Android or just a Linux distro (LibreElec, CoreElec, Ubuntu, RetroPi, RetroarchâŚetc)
Once you learn a bit more you will boycott also SoCs from Allwinner, Broadcom, MediaTek, Samsung and Rockchip. Since none of these vendors gives a sh*t about Linux and they all are only focused on Android e-waste products which is quite understandable since they want to sell their SoCs in the millions and not thousands.
Better get an SBC with a SoC from those vendors who care somewhat about Linux: Renesas, NXP or TI for example!
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Most probably for the same reason every other SoC vendor relies on a 32-bit ARM userland? Since it allows for way lower RAM requirements and doesnât harm performance?
The ârequirementâ for a 64-bit Android is mostly stupid consumers being trained into thinking âthe more the betterâ and naively thinking a 64-bit version would be twice as fast/better/whatever since â64â is twice as big as â32â while in reality providing no other âbenefitâ than binaries being more fat and RAM requirements higher.
Thats sad to hear to be honest. From MediaTek i have experienced it myself in the past. Such a headache to get their chips to work with Linux. However was not aware of those other vendors.
These days if i see a product that i want to buy, i first try to find out which chip it is and search the web if there are any Linux drivers.
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