Rockchip RK3588
Rockchip 8 nm SoC with 4x Cortex-A76 + 4x Cortex-A55 and a 6 TOPS NPU, used by many high-end Raspberry Pi alternatives.
hardware
also known as RK3588, RK3588S
Knowledge about Rockchip RK3588
- Banana Pi for IoT and home servers: BPI-M7 (RK3588) and BPI-M5 (Amlogic S905X3)guide · unverified · Banana Pi spans many SoC vendors. Two representative boards: BPI-M7 with RK3588, up to 32 GB RAM, eMMC, PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe and dual 2.5G Ethernet; BPI-M5 with Amlogic S905X3, 4 GB RAM, 16 GB eMMC and four USB 3.0 ports.
- Enable I2C, SPI, UART and custom device-tree overlays on Orange Pi OS: /boot/orangepiEnv.txtprocedure · unverified · On Orange Pi's Debian/Ubuntu images the boot script reads /boot/orangepiEnv.txt. List kernel-provided overlays in overlays=, add your own .dts with orangepi-add-overlay (goes to user_overlays=), and reboot. Never edit the boot script directly.
- Orange Pi 5 (RK3588S): specs, OS images and the GPIO library you'll actually useguide · unverified · Orange Pi 5 pairs an 8-core RK3588S and a 6 TOPS NPU with 4/8/16 GB RAM and an M.2 NVMe slot. Its GPIO header has 26 pins, and Orange Pi's wiringOP (a wiringPi port) replaces Raspberry Pi GPIO libraries.
- Orange Pi 5-series serial console: 1,500,000 baud on ttyS2, and where the debug UART isprocedure · unverified · When an RK3588 Orange Pi doesn't boot, the debug UART shows why. Orange Pi's RK3588 boot script puts the kernel console on ttyS2 at 1500000 baud. The debug UART is a 3-pin header on the 5, 5B and 5 Plus and part of the 40-pin header on the 5 Max and 5 Pro.
- Orange Pi lineup decoded: 5 vs 5B vs 5 Plus vs 5 Max vs 5 Pro, 3B, Zero 3, Zero 2W, RV2 and CM5comparison · unverified · Orange Pi model names hide real differences: RK3588S vs full RK3588, 26-pin vs 40-pin headers, on-board eMMC and Wi-Fi only on some models, and power supplies from 5 V / 2 A to 5 V / 5 A. A side-by-side table from the official product pages.
- RK3588 boards (Orange Pi 5, Banana Pi BPI-M7, Radxa ROCK 5B): what they share and where they differcomparison · unverified · The Rockchip RK3588/RK3588S family (4x Cortex-A76 + 4x Cortex-A55, 6 TOPS NPU) powers many high-end Raspberry Pi alternatives. The boards differ mainly in PCIe lanes to the NVMe slot, Ethernet speed, header size and software support.
- ROCK64 (Pine64) vs Radxa ROCK 5B: two different 'ROCK' boardsguide · unverified · ROCK64 is Pine64's RK3328 board (Cortex-A53, up to 4 GB, USB 3.0, gigabit Ethernet). Radxa's ROCK 5B is an RK3588 board with a 6 TOPS NPU, PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe and 2.5G Ethernet with PoE support. Don't mix up their docs and images.
- Using the NPU on RK3588/RK3566 Orange Pis: RKNN-Toolkit2 on the PC, RKNN-Toolkit-Lite2 or the C runtime on the boardguide · unverified · The 6 TOPS NPU of the Orange Pi 5 family (and the 0.8 TOPS NPU of the 3B) is used through Rockchip's RKNN stack: convert your model to .rknn with RKNN-Toolkit2 on a PC, then run it on the board with RKNN-Toolkit-Lite2 (Python) or the RKNN Runtime C API. Old RKNN-Toolkit (v1) models don't work.