ROCK 5B Debug Party Invitation

ROCK 5 Series 5B/5B+
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First sbc-bench run: http://ix.io/41BH

Rock5B (and of course other RK3588 thingies) are so far the fastest SBC around (competition). And when comparing performance/watts most probably also the most power efficient (TBC).

Insights:

  • consumption with this set of benchmarks is really low: not exceeding 10W with the most demanding benchmarks (measured at wall with a NetIO ‘PowerCable REST 101F’ and an Apple 94W USB-C charger known for really low losses). Idle consumption with the Ubuntu Focal server image and network at GbE speeds: 3W.
  • CPU clockspeeds are controlled by an MCU inside the SoC (with this OS image A76 cores are clocking in at 2350 MHz instead of 2400 and A55 cores being clocked slightly higher). Also cpufreq governor gets ignored with RK’s BSP. Even with performance the MCU inside the SoC decides to downclock cores if they’ve nothing to do. Which is stuff for further inspection since it could negatively affect real-world workloads (talking Linux here and not Android).
  • There’s 3 CPU clusters: 4 x A55, 2 x A76, 2 x A76. The latter seem to behave the same but ofc they could be configured in different ways: cluster 2 way more aggressively jumping to higher DVFS OPP than cluster 1 and 0 to always allow for maximum single-threaded performance peaks. Again: this seems to be a closed sourced MCU thing if there is really a difference in behaviour of cluster 1 and 2 (both 2 x A76)
  • the supplied fansink is noisy/annoying but a) it does its job and b) Radxa will come up with something else for regular consumers (at least I hope so). Heatsink mounting holes are there and IIRC they’re designed for old x86 Northbridge coolers so there should be plenty of alternatives to the fansink provided with the 5B dev samples
  • memory performance is awesome. When testing the A55 cluster isolated (at 1820 MHz) it gets a 7-ZIP-MIPS score of ~5900 which is 20% ahead of other ARM SoCs featuring four A55 (also at 1.8-2.0 GHz)
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