Rock Pi

Rock Pi#

Radxa’s Rockchip-based SBC family. The operator’s Pi alternative when more cores, more RAM, faster networking, or an on-die NPU matters more than the Pi ecosystem’s polish. The Rock 5B’s RK3588 outpaces the Pi 5 on most benchmarks and ships with multi-gig networking, which the Pi 5 still lacks.

Lineup#

Board

SoC

RAM

Note

Rock 5B

Rockchip RK3588, 4× A76 + 4× A55 + Mali-G610 + 6-TOPS NPU

4 / 8 / 16 / 32 GB

The flagship. Wi-Fi 6, dual 2.5 GbE, USB-C with DisplayPort, M.2 NVMe.

Rock 5A

Rockchip RK3588S (no PCIe 3.0 lanes), same CPU

4 / 8 / 16 GB

Pi-form-factor Rock 5; slightly trimmed I/O.

Rock 4 SE

Rockchip RK3399-T, 2× A72 + 4× A53

4 GB

The previous-generation Pi-replacement. Mature support.

Rock 3A

Rockchip RK3568, 4× A55

2 / 4 / 8 GB

Mid-tier; on-die NPU, PCIe 3.0 × 2, dual GbE.

Rock 3C

Rockchip RK3566, 4× A55

1 / 2 / 4 / 8 GB

Pi Zero-class footprint with a much stronger SoC.

I/O#

Interface

Notes

40-pin GPIO header

Pi-compatible pinout (Rock 5A, Rock 4); the Rock 5B has a similar header in a different layout.

PCIe / M.2

Rock 5B has M.2 M-key (NVMe, PCIe Gen 3 × 4) and E-key (Wi-Fi).

USB

Rock 5B: 2× USB 3.0 + 1× USB-C + 1× USB 2.0.

Network

Rock 5B: dual 2.5 GbE. Rock 3A: dual GbE.

Display

HDMI 2.1 (8K-capable on Rock 5B), DisplayPort over USB-C, MIPI DSI.

Camera

MIPI CSI-2 connector.

Operator use#

  • Pi replacement when bandwidth matters. Dual 2.5 GbE plus NVMe makes the Rock 5B a credible compact network appliance (router, IDS, mitm host).

  • Edge inference with the on-die NPU. RKNN toolkit converts ONNX / TFLite models to the 6-TOPS NPU; lighter than a Jetson for CV tasks that fit.

  • Desktop-on-SBC. RK3588 with 16 GB RAM and an NVMe runs a desktop Linux comfortably; useful as a discreet pivot host the target’s security team won’t recognize as a typical Pi.

Tools#

Tool

Effect

Radxa OS (Debian-based)

The official image. Ubuntu and Armbian also have images for the supported boards.

Armbian

Community Debian / Ubuntu builds; often more current than vendor images.

RKNN Toolkit

Convert and quantise models for the on-die NPU.

rkdeveloptool, rkflashtool

Flash images directly to eMMC over USB in maskrom mode.

libmraa, WiringX, gpiozero (Python)

GPIO libraries that target Rockchip headers.

References#

Contents