RK Processors
Rockchip, abbreviated as RK, is a SOC design company headquartered in Fuzhou, Fujian.
RK has designed a series of SOCs based on the Arm Cortex-A core, shining like stars in the industry and among geeks both domestically and internationally, with a popularity that exceeds many people’s imagination.
By logging into the Rockchip official website, we can see their historical chips.
From the main line, it is divided into seven series: RK30, RK31, RK32, RK33, RV11, PX, and RKNano.
The RKNano series is based on the Arm Cortex-M core, commonly used in fields such as speakers, story machines, and music players.
The PX series is based on the Arm Cortex-A core, mostly used in automotive industry designs.
RV1108 is based on the Arm Cortex-A7, equipped with ISP, and is mainly aimed at the video surveillance field.
The RK30 series mainly includes dual-core Arm Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A9 specifications, with the flagship product being RK3066.
The RK31 series mainly includes quad-core Arm Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A9 specifications, with the flagship product being RK3188.
The RK32 series is most famous for the flagship chip RK3288, a quad-core Arm Cortex-A17, which was favored by Google and used in Chromebooks.
The RK33 series is most famous for the flagship chip RK3399, which adopts a big.LITTLE architecture with dual-core Cortex-A72 + quad-core Cortex-A53, and the A72 has a maximum operating frequency of 2GHz, also being a chip used in Google Chromebooks.
The RK30, RK31, RK32, and RK33 series come with GPU image acceleration and powerful video encoding and decoding capabilities, providing good support for the Android system, and are widely used in products such as tablets and TV boxes.
The RK1808 and RK3399Pro are new chips recently launched by RK, equipped with NPU, focusing on AI functionality.
Popular Development Boards
Thanks to RK’s increasingly open attitude in recent years (RK officially established an open-source website that provides technical reference manuals and related documents for mainstream chips) and the high cost-performance ratio of RK chips, RK chips have gained wide application in the industry while also being favored by geeks, leading to a surge of development boards based on RK SOCs that have gained a large fan base both domestically and internationally.
Below is a list of some well-known development boards:
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RK3288 Series
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Firefly-RK3288: Designed by Firefly, their boards are very popular among domestic players, and their forum documentation is quite detailed.
http://www.t-firefly.com/product/rk3288.html
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Tinker-Board: Designed by ASUS, it competes with the Raspberry Pi.
https://www.asus.com.cn/Single-Board-Computer/Tinker-Board-Series-Products
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Rock2: Designed by Raxda, this development board is widely used among overseas users.
https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock2
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RK3399 Series
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Firefly-RK3399: Designed by Firefly, there is also another model ROC-RK3399-CC.
http://www.t-firefly.com/product/rk3399.html
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NanoPC-T4: Designed by FriendlyElec, they also have NanoPi-M4 and NanoPi-NEO4 based on RK3399.
http://arm9.net/nanopc-T4.asp
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EDGE-RK3399: Designed by Khadas, their boards are extremely cool in appearance.
https://www.khadas.com/edge
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Leez-P710: Designed by Lenovo’s Leez team.
https://leez.lenovo.com/#/p710
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ROCKPro64: Designed by Pine64, this company’s development boards are widely used abroad.
https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/
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ROCK PI 4: Like Rock2, it is also designed by Raxda and competes with the Raspberry Pi, offering great cost performance.
http://rockpi.org/rockpi4
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Rock960: Designed by Vamrs, this board’s biggest feature is that it is designed based on the 96boards specification.
https://www.96boards.org/product/rock960/ai/
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RK3328 Series
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ROCK64: Like ROCKPro64, it is also designed by Pine64, and this board also has a wide user base.
https://www.pine64.org/devices/single-board-computers/rock64/
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RK3399Pro RK1808 Series
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TB-RK3399ProD
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TB-RK1808S0
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TB-96AI
These three development boards are officially launched by Rockchip, focusing on AI applications.
http://t.rock-chips.com/portal.php?mod=list&catid=1
The development boards listed above have a wide user base both domestically and internationally, thus receiving good support in the open-source community, with U-Boot and Linux kernel mainline branches providing relatively complete support for them.
Official Open Materials
As mentioned earlier, Rockchip has adopted a policy of actively embracing open source in recent years. They not only actively submit code to U-Boot and the Linux kernel mainline branches to increase support for RK processors, but also established an official open-source website, releasing important chips’ TRM and datasheet, and also hosting various codes from U-Boot to Linux kernel and userspace on GitHub.
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Rockchip Official Open-Source Website
http://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Main_Page
This provides TRM, Datasheet, and hardware design guidelines for mainstream chips. The TRM is a technical reference manual that contains detailed information from the chip’s various modules to the register level, which is essential for low-level software development. The datasheet provides introductory information about the chip, which can be used as a reference when selecting a solution.
Among them, BSP describes the compilation and packaging methods for codes like U-Boot and Linux kernel.
Graphics and Multimedia describe the software framework for graphics and multimedia encoding and decoding on the Rockchip platform.
Tools and Firmware mainly describe the processes related to chip booting and firmware flashing, which are very helpful for Bootloader-related development.
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GitHub
https://github.com/rockchip-linux
It can be seen that Rockchip has opened more than 100 repositories under this account, including important modules such as U-Boot, Linux kernel, MPP (multimedia), and libmali (GPU).
Among them, the doc repository is particularly noteworthy, as it contains detailed design and usage documents for various modules on the RK platform, which are important reference materials for in-depth understanding of the RK platform.
Support for Rockchip Platform from Well-Known Open Source Projects
U-Boot
https://gitlab.denx.de/u-boot/u-boot
Linux Kernel
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git
From the Git commit records, both RK itself and some overseas open-source enthusiasts are very active in supporting the RK platform, with a large number of code submissions for RK platform support in almost every version. Many development boards based on the RK platform can be booted directly using the mainline U-Boot and Linux Kernel.
Especially with the recent release of Linux 5.3, which added support for Arm Mali GPU, it is now possible to use the Mali GPU on the Rockchip platform with the mainline Linux kernel.
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Armbian
https://www.armbian.com/
Armbian provides Debian and Ubuntu compatible images for various Arm development boards, supporting a large number of development boards based on RK chips.
Players can directly download the compiled images released by Armbian or download the Armbian code to compile themselves.
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Libreelec
https://libreelec.tv/
Libreelec is a TV OS focused on multimedia playback based on Kodi, allowing you to turn your development board into a smooth and easy-to-use TV box. It also provides good support for many development boards based on RK chips.
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Lakka
https://www.lakka.tv/
Lakka is an open-source OS aimed at game controllers, allowing you to turn your development board into a powerful gaming console.
You can directly download the firmware provided on their official website or download the source code to compile it yourself.
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Collabora
Collabora is a well-known open-source organization that has submitted a large amount of code to the Linux Kernel mainline for the Rockchip platform, providing significant support for GPU graphics acceleration and multimedia on the Rockchip platform. Reading their blog can keep you updated on the latest technical trends in the Linux open-source community.
