ARM processors from the Chinese manufacturer Rockchip such as the RK 3399 (Pro) are used in Chromebooks and embedded systems as well as on single-board computers such as NanoPi M4, Odroid-N1 and RockPro 64 are used.

At an event for developers Rockchip has now announced the RK 3588, which compared to the RK 3399 has more and significantly stronger ARM computing cores: Instead of two Cortex-A 72 – and four Cortex- A 53 – Cores therefore each have four Cortex-A 76 and Cortex-A 55 are used. This CPU configuration is similar to that of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx for notebooks and Snapdragon 53 for smartphones and tablets, which, however, clock at over 2.6 GHz .

Faster GPU, PCIe 3.0 Also other functional blocks of the system-on- Chip (SoC) RK 3588 Rockchip has significantly improved compared to the RK 3399: So an ARM Mali GPU with four new “Odin” cores (MP4) and a stronger Neural Processing Unit (NPU) are to be used. Via HDMI 2.1 the RK 3588 can control two displays at the same time, the resolutions up to 8K with 60 Hz display refresh rate or 4K / 120 p. In addition, displays can be connected via MIPI DSI and eDP.

According to the advance information that CNX-Software.com reports from the Rockchip Developer Conference (RKDC), the memory controller is for up to 32 GByte RAM of the types LPDDR4X or LPDDR5 designed.

Per PCI Express 3.0 x4, the RK 3588 can connect, for example, fast NVMe SSDs; SATA 6G and USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5 GBit / s) as well as Gigabit Ethernet (via RGMII, i.e. with a separate Phy-Chip) are also planned.

During the 2016 Preceding RK 3399 still with 28 – nanometer technology is produced, Rockchip allows the RK 3588 with 8 nanometer Manufacture structures. Actually, the RK 3588 was already planned for 2020, Rockchip (Fuzhou Ruixin Micro-Electronic Co. Ltd.) but not now either.

(ciw)