Radxa 6 under development

supports 5V input only.

That’s probably true. This board seems to only expect DC 5V input, not the 9/12/20V negotiated through the USB-C PD. But given that it uses TSMC 6nm and doesn’t support NVMe, the maximum power consumption of this board shouldn’t be too high.

5V2A or 3A can be found on many pd chargers and should not be that problematic, it’s just idea that violates PD protocol assumptions where You should operate on wattage and don’t check whatever particular charger has some mode or not. Now You can have 120W GaN charger that will not power up pi5 with sufficient power. Is this that hard today to use more voltages if needed? We will end up with pencil thick usb cable that need to carry 5V20A :smiley:

If implemented in any recent SBC, can change in a little monster :sweat_smile:.

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My minimal requirements would be:

  • A U-Boot that can do UEFI Secure Boot and store UEFI variables reliably
  • A supported (with security updates) stable kernel with drivers for all devices at least in the 6.7 range

Without those satisfied, I am not interested.

I would love for Radxa 6 to have a solid PCIe implementation. Not sure if MediaTek is the answer since I haven’t seen an SBC with M.2/PCIe slot with them.

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I’d easily be willing to pay more if it has an AV1 hardware encoder. :innocent:

Yes, 8Kp60 AV1 decoding.

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If there will be a built in WiFi / BT chip, can you guys choose something other than AIC8800? The driver is really a pain (WiFi 6 not working with UniFi WiFi 6, Bluetooth driver unstable)

And if there’s space in the PCB, routing USB pins to the GPIO or having separate pins exposed for USB 3 makes it easier to make custom USB peripherals or extension boards.

Also to have a well tested Power Delivery 3.0 as I think lots of RPi 5 users and Radxa Rock 5 users are caught out by power supply issues.

Faster eMMC modules are also good to have.

And please hire more people to write full documentation! I know you guys work really hard but lots of things aren’t kept up with the latest changes so lots of your team’s time have been wasted to answer questions that could be solved by comprehensive documentation.

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The RK3688 looks more interesting https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/10/04/rockchip-rk3688-armv9-3-aiot-processor-to-feature-a-16-tops-npu-ufs-4-0-storage/
Personally I would ditch the NPU and use that die space for as many core GPU as you can fit, as the frameworks vulkan and opencl offer far more interoperbillity than vendor NPU frameworks.
You also get two use cases where both ML and Gamers should be massively impressed than splitting that die space between a low core count GPU & NPU.
I guess the IP for a GPU is much more than vendor created NPU, the link says a 16tops NPU and if like the RK3588 and no where near rated, with a limited number of models that will run and a conversion framework that seems like Voodoo it all becomes very much less impressive.

Really? the right question Radxa should be asking to themselves is how to make a SoC as powerful (or at least 80% as powerful) as best consumer chips out there, pricing for this Board should be lower than … say a 8cxgen3 phone instead. Not to mention there are others competing product like Dimensity 9300 .

If they failed to do so, there aren’t going be realistic/ competitive enough for consumers to get interested into buying one; let’s be frank right, the only reason people are hype about rk3588 is just because it’s cheap and looks quite powerful and open source; nothing more nothing less. Look at all those crazily super high pricing product with the similar chip, they don’t sell! As ironic as that!

I saw rk3588 product which is selling more than 500, even 1000 dollars; really who you think you are ? Apple?
Even Apple got punished by sales when they got too greedy, look at the failure sales figures of the pathetic Apple Vision Pro!

(just an idea :nerd_face::cowboy_hat_face:).

Amusing, so it’s slower than the CIX-P1 in the Orion-O6 as it currently ships, since it has the same cores in same quantity but at lower frequency. INT4 can be cool, however.

Any progress / news on this matter?
Will it be possible to pre-order?

Cortex-A78 is kind of old even for products launched today. It should at least be the Cortex-7xx. And btw, you don’t just simply mix and match the Cortex-A78 with Cortex-A72 in the same SoC.

Even if a Rock 6 was planned, knowing how Rockchip started acting, I’d rather wait for more information about the Dragons.

Hopefully Qualcomm will be nicer and better…

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Dragon may be bit faster than Rock 5B*
but it’s not flagship :slight_smile: has better AI and less IO. Next flagship Rockchip is expected to be ARM v9.
Most of Rock products features some Rockchips (except one zero?), Dragon is nice name for new series. Cubie for allwinner, orion for cix, nio, x, sirider etc. So we may not see Rock 6 if there will be no something like RK3688 available for such products.

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I’m very out of the loop.
What is meant with “how Rockchip started acting”?

Orange Pi products were found in drones used in the Ukraine war. Rockchip freaked out as they could be sanctioned and its rumoured they have tightened control of their chips supply.

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Is this for m.2 slots or for network/video cards?

Yeah, yeah. I was unclear. By “better” I still meant the company’s behavior, not chip’s performance.

Technically true, and seeing an ARMv9 SBC in 5B and 5C formats (maybe even a compute module) would be awesome… But what’s the point if software sucks and the community has to work for years with little result in order to make anything work? We’ll get ARMv10 before such hypothetical RK3688 gets full support.

That too, but that’s not what I meant to say. I meant mainly how Rockchip doesn’t care about providing proper Linux support. Which is understandable from some perspectives, but bad for us all here.

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