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Maybe you missed it? Best Single Board Computers 2021/2 – RPi Alternatives
ROCK 3A
Radxa team has just announced their latest SBC named ROCK 3 powered with a brand Rockchip RK3568 chip. The new hardware also includes a few improvements, such as DDR4 memory and QC/PD power support. In Comparison to the previous Rockchip RK3399, its new CPU can reach up to 2GHZ, plus the GPU is faster than the ARM Mali-T860 MP4, capable of reaching up to a respectful higher frequency of 800-950 MHz.
ROCK 3A is simply an improved version of ROCK Pi 4 with some performance enhancements as well as additional new interfaces.
ROCK 3A | Board Layout
Front-View
Rear-View
Powered with a Brand New RK3568 CPU
WIFI 6 Support
Radaxa team added an additional M.2 slot with PCIe to ROCK 3A board, so you can basically attach one NVMe SSD and another M.2 module such as a WIFI 6 M.2 card.
Interfaces
The ROCK 3A features an M key socket that supports two PCIe 3.0 lanes for NVMe SSDs and an E key with a single PCIe 2.0 lane. You also have all the typical I/O interfaces you expect from a standard SBC, which include an HDMI port, four USB ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and a compatible Raspberry Pi 40-pin GPIO header.
Specification
- SoC – RK3568
- CPU – Quad A55 up to 2GHz
- GPU – Mali G52 GPU, 0.8T NPU
- OS: Android 11.0 , Debian 10 / Ubuntu / Slackware
- Pluggable eMMC module, 2/4/8GB LPDDR4 3200MT/s, dram controller frequency up to 1560MHz
- QC/PD power support, with a new generation QC/PD protocol IC
- Two USB2 same as ROCK Pi 4, two USB3(1x OTG+1x HOST), the two USB3 can be configured in SATA mode with a SATA breakout cable
- GbE with PoE support
- M.2 M key for NVMe with PCIe 3.0 x2 lanes
- M.2 E key for connectivity with PCIe 2.0 x1/SDIO/UART, support Wi-Fi 6 cards
- 1x MIPI DSI, 1x MIPI CSI, compatible with ROCK Pi 4
- 40P GPIO header, mostly compatible with ROCK Pi 4
Price & Availability
The ROCK 3A is expected to be officially sold by the end of 2021, from US$35 for 2 GB of RAM. As for the highest level configurations. The 4 GB of RAM variant will retail for US$55, and the 8 GB of RAM will sell for US$75.
ROCK 3A is expected to run the latest Android 11.0 as well as Debian 10 / Ubuntu, maintained by the Toybrick team. Other community distributions will probably be also supported too.
Final prices based on different configurations:
| Configuration | RAM | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2GB RAM | 35USD |
| 2 | 4GB RAM | 55USD |
| 3 | 8GB RAM | 75USD |
Yet another Rpi competitor that looks so good on paper. Yet 7 months later we still have hacked OS’s that only partially work. I am not criticizing the many volunteers that work on these projects, but I am criticizing the companies who offer glorious (potentially) hardware, that needs others working for little to nothing to hack together a workable set of instructions to try to get the board to live up to its potential. I have one of these boards, and some of the connectors are shoddy and fragile to say the least. To verify that all the hardware functions… Read more »