Radxa Releases Cheap RK3399-Based Rock Pi 4 Development Board
Rockchip’s RK3399 SoC is a favorite chip among manufacturers for its AI capabilities and high computing power, which is evident in some recent SBCs — including Pine64’s RockPro64, FriendlyElec’s NanoPC-T4, and Khadas’ Edge line, just to name a few. We can now add Radxa’s Rock Pi 4 to that list, and it’s the cheapest RK3399-based board to hit the market at just $39.
The RK3399 SoC packs a quad-core 1.5GHz Cortex-A53 with a dual-core 2GHz Cortex-A72 in a big.LITTLE arrangement, along with a Mali T860MP4 GPU. Radxa offers two versions of the board — the Model A, and Model B (sound familiar?), both featuring the same SoC and most of the same hardware, but diverge in the connectivity options. It should be noted as well, that each board features increased amounts of RAM options — 1/2/4Gb of LPDDR4, depending on your preferences.
As far as the rest of the hardware is concerned, both boards offer an eMMC socket, micro SD card slot (up to 128Gb), M.2 NVME SSD socket, and 40-pin GPIO. They also pack an HDMI 2.0a port, MIPI CSI2 camera connector, 3.5mm audio jack, 2X USB 2.0 ports, 1X USB 3.0 port, 1X USB 3.0 OTG port, RTC, and Ethernet GbE LAN.
The only real difference between Model A and B are the connectivity options, as the latter has integrated 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, onboard ceramic antenna and an option for PoE via Raspberry Pi’s PoE HAT. With that said, both boards can “officially” support Android, Debian, and Ubuntu, but chances are you can probably run most anything Linux-based.
Kadxa hasn’t provided a release date for the Rock Pi 4 line as of yet, the boards are expected to be priced at $39 (1Gb), $49 (2Gb) and $65 (4Gb) for the Model A variants, and $49 (1Gb), $59 (2Gb) or $75 (4Gb) for the Model B options.
