The landscape of SoCs for Android TV boxes has been stagnant for years now, so some new information is welcome; in this case, we’re not covering the recently unveiled Rockchip RK3538 and RK3572 SoCs.
In the case of the RK3538 SoC , this is a product aimed at low-cost devices , as it is limited to 1080p resolution and can only handle a maximum of 2 GB of RAM. On the other hand, the RK3572 appears to offer more power due to its hardware configuration and specifications, which already support 4K@60. In any case, these will be products that remain in uncertified systems.
Two processors aimed at different sectors that we may see integrated into Chinese Android TV boxes and TV sticks in the future. We might also see them in retro consoles, which could be interesting given that Rockchip has significant firmware support and apps like Portmaster with ported PC games.
Rockchip RK3572 SoC with 4K support
The new Rockchip RK3572 SoC includes two high-performance Arm Cortex-A73 cores clocked up to 2.3 GHz and four Arm Cortex-A53 cores clocked up to 2.0 GHz designed for low power consumption; for AI support, it features a small 3 TOPS NPU. The GPU is an Imagination Mali-G310 V2, which we find, for example, in the popular AMLogic S905X5M. As we can see from some tests published on a development board with this SoC, the scores aren’t bad.
This SoC appears to support resolutions up to 4K@6120fps; while the supported codecs are currently unknown, it will certainly support at least AV1. It also offers options for LPDDR4/4x or LPDDR5/5x RAM and the ability to control USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and UFS 2.1 storage.
Rockchip RK3538 for low-cost 1080p
Its younger sibling is the Rockchip RK3538, a SoC featuring a quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 configuration, similar to what we find in other low-cost hardware products. On the graphics side, it features a fairly basic Mali G310 GPU.
The system we can build with this processor is quite limited; as we can see, it only supports USB 2.0 and is capped at 1080p output resolution. It can only handle a maximum of 2 GB of RAM, and for storage, we’re stuck with eMMC 5.1 support , which is a bit outdated.
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