RK3188-SOM, RK3188-SOM-4GB and RK3188-SOM-EVB are in stock now!

RK3188-SOM and RK3188-SOM-4GB system on modules are now in stock, these modules have same size as A20-SOM 81.28 x 55.88 mm and use same 0.05″ connectors, well they are not exchangeable though.

RK3188 is quad core, Cortex-A9 running at 1.6GHz. What does this means? Comparing to A20 you can expect everything to run about 10 times faster.

As power requirements, it takes more power than A20 obviously you pay for the performance and the higher clock rates.

For these who want to make their own board we made RK3188-SOM-EVB template with:

• HDMI
• 100Mb Ethernet
• x4 USB hosts
• USB-OTG
• RTC clock and backup battery
• +6-16VDC power supply
• LCD connector where you can connect LCD-OLinuXino-XX LCDs
• 2x 40 pin 0.1″ step GPIO connectors

RK3188-SOM starts from EUR 35 for 1000 pcs and it’s probably least expensive quad core Cortex-A9 1.6Ghz module on the market, the RK3188-SOM-4GB starts from EUR 40 / 1000 pcs.

The evaluation board RK3188-SOM-EVB cost EUR 70

RK3188-SOM Quad Core Cortex-A9 running at 1.6GHz System On Module first prototypes work fine

May is the month of our System On Modules 🙂

Today our next SOM with RK3188 successfully was tested and OK.

This one is little beast comparing to A20 it have 4x Cortex-A9 vs 2x Cortex-A7 and runs on 1.6GHz vs. 1GHz so RK3188 makes total 16000 DMPIS vs. 3800 DMIPS for A20 (4.2 times faster) and vs. 965 DMIPS for RaspberryPi (16.6 times faster).

On the SOM there is:

• RK3188 running at 1.6Ghz
• 1GB DDR3 memory
• Power Managment Unit IC
• optional 4GB NAND Flash
• micro SD-card to boot Llinux or Android
• two buttons
• three status LEDs
• debug UART console
• 5 GPIO connectors 2×20 pins 0.05″ step

RK3188-SOM and RK3188-SOM-4GB will be available for sale in June. The price of RK3188-SOM will be EUR 40 / 1000 pcs, the price of RK3188-SOM-4GB will be EUR 45 / 1000 pcs

RK3188-SOM-EVB is also available with Eagle CAD files, so any one can tailor board to his needs:

The RK3188-SOM-EVB reference design have:

• RK3188-SOM-4GB module
• 4x USB Hosts
• 1x USB OTG
• HDMI output
• 100MB Ethernet
• RTC with backup battery
• LCD connector compatible with A13-LCDxx A10-LCDxx, A20-LCDxx displays we have
• 2x UEXT connectors
• 2x 40 pin GPIO connectors

RK3188-SOM-EVB will be available for sale in June too and the price is EUR 85.00

Android and Debian Linux will be provided.

cpuinfo:

root@rk3188-som:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo 
Processor : ARMv7 Processor rev 0 (v7l)
processor : 0
BogoMIPS : 1631.46
processor : 1
BogoMIPS : 1631.46
processor : 2
BogoMIPS : 1631.46
processor : 3
BogoMIPS : 1631.46
Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant : 0x3
CPU part : 0xc09
CPU revision : 0
Hardware : RK30board
Revision : 0000
Serial : 0000000000000000

and meminfo:

root@rk3188-som:~# cat /proc/meminfo 
MemTotal: 856652 kB
MemFree: 561600 kB
Buffers: 13652 kB
Cached: 200592 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 121004 kB
Inactive: 137368 kB
Active(anon): 44260 kB
Inactive(anon): 456 kB
Active(file): 76744 kB
Inactive(file): 136912 kB
Unevictable: 0 kB
Mlocked: 0 kB
HighTotal: 155648 kB
HighFree: 8676 kB
LowTotal: 701004 kB
LowFree: 552924 kB
SwapTotal: 0 kB
SwapFree: 0 kB
Dirty: 0 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
AnonPages: 44168 kB
Mapped: 21492 kB
Shmem: 572 kB
Slab: 13864 kB
SReclaimable: 7552 kB
SUnreclaim: 6312 kB
KernelStack: 1592 kB
PageTables: 1696 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
WritebackTmp: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 428324 kB
Committed_AS: 451232 kB
VmallocTotal: 122880 kB
VmallocUsed: 42728 kB
VmallocChunk: 32636 kB

 

 

RK3188 Quad Core Cortex-A9 Android stick teardown

My RK3188 Android stick arrived yesterday and needless to say it was disassembled immediately.

What I like is the big external WIFI antenna it makes reliable connection to the WIFI router even if the signal is weak.

What I didnt like: there was tiny 0.8 mm thick aluminum plate placed on top of RK3188 with … double side adhesive tape 🙂 c’mon guys this tape is thicker than the aluminum plate, what termal transfer will it have??

This stick was $30 cheaper than A31 stick I bought one week ago, but when I opened it I could see why – it have only 1GB of RAM not 2GB as A31 stick had!

Something else I missed in the brief datasheet is that RK3188 have no native HDMI but only RGB LCD interface, so it needs IT66121 RGB-HDMI transciever to connect to HDMI TVs. No signs of HDMI TVS protectors like in all cheap Android sticks, these are pretty expensive and should not be wasted 🙂 you can see there is provision for them on the PCB but they are no populated, you better pry your TV have no static electricity charge when you connect your Android stick to it 🙂

there is something else which always puzzles me when I open these sticks. When we design our OLinuXino schematics and follow all rules we place between 120 and 150 filtering capacitors to all voltage / GND points – and these chips have *LOT* of voltages, for the cores, for the peripherials, for the output buffers, etc etc.

All these sticks have no more than 30 capacitors at all! What does this means – less noise immunity, and sometimes digital parts could latch-up but who cares when these sticks are so cheap 😉

Linux-Rockchip.info Wiki site is created to collect info about Rockchip SoCs

Last week I blogged about the amazing RK3188 Quad core processor from Rockchip https://olimex.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/rk3188-usd-12-quad-core-cortex-a9-running-at-1-8ghz/

The site www.linux-rockchip.info was created to collect all available info for Rockchip devices in a form of Wiki.

Rockchip is way more closed than Allwinner, they do not understand open source and Linux and are in the same state of mind like Allwinner 2 years ago. With lot of push from Open Source evangelists Allwinner slowly opened and now even released some of their closed source code for the bootloader and flash controller.

Rockchip is still in the stone age, they require NDA and $5000 to send you SDK for building Android images which even have no sources inside but binary blobs.

All Rockchip kernel and Linux support so far is done by group of hackers who reverse engineer their code for fun and they have already significant success.

The reason Linux-Rockchip.info was created is to have place where to collect all info for Rockchip like Linux-Sunxi.org is doing for Allwinner SoCs.

RK3188 USD 12 Quad Core Cortex-A9 running at 1.8Ghz

RK3188 is Quad Core Cortex-A9 processor running at up to 1.8 GHz produced on 28 nm process, with Quad core Mali 400 @ 533 Mhz.

This SoC  was released just few months ago but took the tablet and Android devices market by storm like this was done one year ago by A10 from Allwinner.

The competition between these two companies Rockchip and Allwinner is with long traditions. The result is incredible productivity combined with rock bottom low prices as the stake is million devices Android market.

RK3188 is build on 28 nm process which allow it to work reliable up to 1.6-1.8Ghz although overclocing up to 1.92Ghz with proper cooling is reported here: http://liliputing.com/2013/06/rockchip-rk3188-chip-overclocked-to-run-at-1-92-ghz.html

If you look at ebay now there are lot of RK3188 devices at very competitive prices.

With so many RK3188 devices it’s just matter of time Linux community around Rockchip to be formed same as the Linux-Sunxi community around Allwinner chips.

There are already several blog posts for Ubuntu running on RK3188 http://liliputing.com/2013/06/ubuntu-up-and-running-on-android-min-pcs-with-rk3188-chips.html

and Linux sources http://liliputing.com/2013/06/linux-source-code-for-rockchip-rk3188-devices-now-available.html some very basic functionality also hit mainline.

More links: http://www.omegamoon.com/blog/ and https://github.com/aloksinha2001

IRC channel at freenode #linux-rockchip is set where RK3188 Linux developers chat.

Unfortunately there is almost no info for RK3188 on internet.

The only RK3188 brief is available which I put on Github https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO/tree/master/HARDWARE/RK3188-PDFs .

Rockchip seems much more closed than Allwinner. While Allwinner already learned that Open Source community just help them to sell more Chips by providing Linux support for free, Rockchip is still one year behind and do not see any benefits from Linux and Open Source.

If you look at their web site there are no e-mails (actually there is one e-mail which they do not answer at all) and just few phones for distributors in different Chinese sites.

As the chip is new, it still have not hit the stocking distributors in Shenzhen too.  So how you buy chips?

Not easy! I asked Chinese friend to call these phones and ask for sales person – he did but from Rockchip ask him for the Chinese name of the sales person he want to contact to connect him?!? hmmmmm, typical Chicken-Egg problem – to buy chips you have to contact sales person, but you cant contact him if you do not know him 🙂

Tom Cubie (aka hipboi) who made Cubieboard wrote on irc channel that  visited Rockchip and learned that Rockchip targets to sell 50 millions RK3188 chips this year, no wonder they are not interested in selling chips to some smallish Western customers who will just bother them with GPL sources and endless technical support questions.

Also interesting info which Tom shared is that the volume price of RK3188 is USD $12.00 ( or $3 per 1.8GHz Cortex-A9 core !) now this is the reason for the so low cost of RK3188 devices. Sure this price will be not for mortal non-Chinese who buy less 100 Kpcs, but whatever margin above it have in the sales chain it will be still much more below th $40 price for the 1Ghz 4 core iMX6 for instance.

SO RK3188 is really interesting Chip and if we can obtain more info we would be definitely interested to release OLinuXino with it.

After some days bothering Rockchip on the phone and presening Olimex we seems to break the ice.

The key was to show them the A10, A10S, A13, A20 boards we did already for Allwinner.

Rockchip sent us NDA to complete and now we are waiting their HQ to approve us and eventually to give us access to more info so we can complete board with RK3188.

Crossing fingers this to happen soon 😉