As current ROCK 5B+ SKUs don’t have eMMC onboard, if you want to do SMD mounting by yourself, you can find the supported eMMC Models from the RKeMMCSupportList
here https://dl.radxa.com/rock5/hw/RKeMMCSupportList%20Ver1.84_20240815.pdf
RK3588 /ROCK 5B+ eMMC support list
Peter, I know you are trying to help, but I think this approach is flawed. On the 5B+ product webpage you advertise that the emmc being soldered to the board is an ‘upgrade’ over the previous socket version. But then you don’t ship it and you provide a list of packages for users to go do it themselves. How is this possibly an upgrade? It is in fact a 100% downgrade - it is absent. And now you are suggesting people could go do it themselves!! Yes, I get it, in theory, it is possible. But the process will double the cost of the board and nullify any warranty you might have. What are you thinking here? Radxa needs to start shipping boards with the emmc or at an absolute minimum provide a firm date.
we will provide the SKUs with EMMC onboard and I don’t suggest people to do it themselves, but currently some people want to add the EMMC on board by themselves(maybe they have some emmc components) and they ask us to provide the supported list, so I post here.
that’s fair. do you have an eta on sku’s?
End of October or early November
@radxa consider this (opi max) approach in future:
eMMC socket and eMMC pads for soldering bga chip. If somebody can solder bga, he also should be able to remove connectors if needed.
I just took a look at ROCK 4 SE and ROCK 5A, and the area between the connectors are occupied by traces and vias. There is even 1 resistor in case of 4 SE. So designing that way requires more efforts on the layout to avoid quite a significant board area. I’m not sure if there is enough demand to justify that, especially when some of our designs are pretty crammed.
It is a neat trick though.
Sure, definitely this design needs some attention at early stage and more space than bga pads alone,
but it’s possible and as You said - nice trick
I checked Orange Pi 5 Max to see how they are able to sacrifice that much board area, and they used a lot of compact B2B connectors for camera & PCIe. So they have their own tradeoffs.
Definitely,
But this is also smallest RK3588 board. 5B+ is pico-itx so different start point
BTW: will UFS use same amount of pads as eMMC? is there any standard for UFS modules now?
Right now there is no plan to support detachable UFS. The 2 SoC vendors we work on that have UFS support (MTK & Qualcomm) kinda require mandatory UFS on the device, and at least for Qualcomm it is required to even boot at all. Not exactly surprising given their mobile root.
UFS could replace NVME in terms of speed, but I afraid it will be way more expensive. If that’s also fixed to board - then some option needs to be included in start price.
RK3688 will support UFS, but still no word about pcie speed and # of lanes. Maybe it could be fast, small, for system + space for some cheap nvme.
Radxa said “End of October or early November” as an eta for shipping the 5B+ with onboard emmc actually fitted. Any update?
Radxa still advertise onboard emmc as an “upgrade” vs the 5B. That’s deceptive marketing. In fact they should be more honestly stating that they don’t at this time offer emmc onboard. - because that is a true statement.
Sorry for the delay, rock 5b+ with emmc onboard should be ready at the early at November, but we wanted to merge another order, so it delayed, but it will be produced in the factory soon, we will lunch it asap
This design is very risky and will have signal integration issue since the eMMC signal are routed to two ends. This is a very unprofessional way of implementing it.
Are there any differential pairs? Is there any way to switch between those?
Or maybe it’s just easier to quickly release yet another version with eMMC socket?
Just looking for the best, I’m happy with eMMC connector on 5B and no such option for 5B+ is just disadvantage for me
My beef is I purchased based on the website advertising an “upgraded” emmc solution. I wanted to boot from emmc and not use sdcard or nvme. It simply didn’t occur to me that they were actually shipping with zero emmc. After all, how can zero be an upgrade? And it’s still advertised today in the same deceptive way.cI think the least Radxa could do is to change their website description to make clear that it’s zero emmc - just an empty set of solder balls.
hi, any update on if the versions with EMMC are in production?
I’m sorry to have kept you waiting for so long. ROCK 5B+ with emmc on board’s production will be completed within this week, and it will be listed on arace next week.