Radxa Shrinks the ROCK 5 ITX+, Delivers the Smaller and Sleeker ROCK 5T
With a few notable exceptions, the biggest being its SATA ports, all the features of the larger ROCK 5 ITX+ have made the transition.
Embedded electronics specialist Radxa has announced a new entry in its ROCK 5 family of single-board computers, and this time it's aiming for those who find mini-ITX just too big of a footprint with the more compact ROCK 5T.
"ROCK 5T [has] all the features and interfaces of a mini-ITX board, now in a smaller size without any compromise," Radxa claims of its latest creation, which is inspired by its earlier and noticeably larger ROCK 5 ITX+ single-board computer. "[It is] an elegant single-board computer based on the [Rockchip] RK3588 chipset. Its 110×82mm [around 4.33×3.23"] size encompasses almost all [the] features of the RK3588, offering exceptional flexibility and scalability. ROCK 5T provides a solid foundation for geeks, SBC enthusiasts, IoT [Internet of Things] hobbyists, and students and teachers in academia to bring their ideas to life."
Based on the company's existing ROCK 5 ITX+ SBC, the ROCK 5T — brought to our attention by CNX Software — is powered by the same Rockchip RK3588 system-on-chip, or the industrial-grade RJ3588J at the buyer's choice. This features four Arm Cortex-A76 cores running at up to 2.4GHz (2.2GHz in -J variant) and four lower-power Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 1.8GHz, an Arm Mali G610-MC4 graphics processor, a vision processor with 8k60 H.265/VP9/AVS2/AV1 and 8k30 H.264 decode and 8k30 H.264/H.265 encode, and an on-board neural network coprocessor delivering a claimed six tera-operations per second (TOPS) of minimum-precision compute for on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) workloads.
Alongside a choice of 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 24GB, or 32GB of LPDDR5 memory, Radxa's board includes two M.2 M-key slots with two lanes of PCI Express Gen. 3 connectivity for Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) storage or hardware accelerators, two 2.5-gigabit-Ethernet ports, Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth connectivity, an M.2 B-key connector for an optional cellular modem with SIM card slot, and up to four simultaneous display outputs chosen from an 8k60 HDMI output, a 4k60 HDMI output, a 4k60 DisplayPort output over USB Type-C Alternate Mode, and a 1080p60 four-lane MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) connector. There's an HDMI input. too, along with two four-lane MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) connectors, two USB 3.1 Gen. 1, and two USB 2.0 ports, plus a Raspberry Pi-style 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header.
Not everything from the larger ROCK 5 ITX+ has made the jump to the compact ROCK 5T, though: the M.2 E-key socket has been dropped in favor of an integrated Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module, there's no optical S/PDIF audio output, no on-board battery holder for the real-time clock, no support for an ATX-standard power supply, and — in the biggest loss, particularly for those considering using the board at the heart of a low power network attached storage (NAS) build — no SATA ports.
More information on the ROCK 5T is available on the Radxa website; international orders are being handled by Arace, which at the time of writing listed only the commercial-grade non-J variants in two memory capacities: 16GB at $139.50 and 32GB at $219.50.