Radxa Launches the ROCK 5C, 5C Lite Single-Board Computer systems — And Adopts Raspberry Pi’s PCIe Pinout

Embedded computing specialist Radxa has introduced a pair of recent ROCK single-board computer systems (SBCs), constructed round a Rockchip RK3588S2 or RK3582 system-on-chip: the ROCK 5C and ROCK 5C Lite.

“Radxa ROCK 5C is a compact single-board laptop that gives a spread of cutting-edge options, traits, and growth choices,” the corporate claims. “It’s the ultimate selection for makers, IoT [Internet of Things] fans, hobbyists, players, PC customers, and anybody in want of a high-spec platform with glorious efficiency and reliability.”

The ROCK 5C is the newest entry within the ever-growing ROCK household of single-board computer systems, following the discharge of the bigger pico-ITX ROCK 3B again in November final 12 months. Regardless of the corporate having declared pico-ITX as “the proper SBC type issue” on the time, the ROCK 5C is a return to the Raspberry Pi-like format — mimicking the Raspberry Pi 4, although with solely a single full-size HDMI connector the place the Raspberry Pi has two micro-HDMI ports.

The flagship ROCK 5C mannequin is constructed across the Rockchip RK3588S2 system-on-chip, giving 4 high-performance Arm Cortex-A76 cores with 4 lower-power Cortex-A55 cores in a DynamIQ configuration alongside an Arm Mali G610 MP4 graphics processor; the ROCK 5C Lite swaps this out for a Rockchip RK3582, which drops two of the Cortex-A76 cores and your entire GPU.

Each fashions, curiously, embody an built-in neural processing unit (NPU) for on-device machine studying — delivering as much as 5 tera-operations per second (TOPS) on the ROCK 5C Lite and 6 TOPS on the Rock 5C, each on the lowest INT4 precision.

Widespread to each boards are help for as much as 32GB of LPDDR4x reminiscence, an on-board eMMC connector alongside a microSD slot for storage, an HDMI 2.1 port help 8k60 output, a MIPI Show Serial Interface (DSI) port for 1080p60, and a MIPI Digital camera Serial Interface (CSI) port good for one four-lane or two two-lane connections.

There are two full-size USB 2.0 ports, a single USB 3.0 Host port, and a second USB 3.0 port that may function in Host or On-The-Go (OTG) modes. There is a gigabit Ethernet port with non-compulsory Energy-over-Ethernet (PoE) help, on-board Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 radios, an analog headphone jack, plus a 40-pin general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) header.

There’s an attention-grabbing inclusion on the far finish of the board, too: a flat versatile circuit (FFC) connector primarily based on the one discovered on the Raspberry Pi 5, carrying a single lane of PCI Categorical Gen. 2.1 connectivity — and, in concept, delivering help for Raspberry Pi 5 PCIe add-on boards, together with the recently-launched M.2 HAT+.

Extra data on the ROCK 5C and ROCK 5C Lite is accessible on the Radxa product web page; the boards are on sale now beginning at $34.30 for the ROCK 5C Lite with 1GB of RAM and topping out at $228.54 for the ROCK 5C with 32GB of RAM.