New SoC from Rockchip presented with interesting improvements, where the powerful RK3688, which includes Cortex A-7xx cores with Armv9.3 architecture, undoubtedly stands out.
These new products, as always, will take some time to reach the market, but indicate a good evolution with more power and new features. For now we will see them in development boards, for example those of Radxa, which has already echoed this announcement and intends to integrate them in its new Radxa ROCK 6.
Rockchip RK3688
The most promising SoC of this new generation is the RK3688, a hardware that mounts as cores the new ARM Cortex-A7xx, these processors will premiere the ARMv9.3 architecture of which we still do not have technical data. This SoC offers a power of 250K DMIPS (the RK3588 reaches 93K DMIPS), integrates an undefined GPU of 1 TFLOPS and an NPU for AI that reaches 16 TOPS. Figures that seem a considerable leap compared to Rockchip’s current range.It also has an LPDDR4/4x/5 memory interface of up to 128 bits and supports UFS 4.0 storage.
Rockchip RK35XX
In the same announcement has been presented new entry-level RK35XX Octa Core that we will surely see in Android TV-Box, consoles and development boards. This one features two Cortex-A72 cores and six Cortex-A53 cores, an Arm Mali G310 GPU, a 2 TOPS NPU, plus it supports LPDDR4/4x/5 RAM and eMMC 5.1 and UFS 3.0 storage. A significant improvement over the current RK3566/3568 that we have reviewed multiple times and is quite popular.
Rockchip for high performance
On the same slide we have a third processor variant focused on the high performance sector. The description is more ambiguous and only indicates that it supports 256-bit vector instructions, mounts a 16 TOPS NPU and supports DRAM with up to 1 TB/s bandwidth. This chip thanks to the UCIe support allows to communicate multiple processors, this is a solution focused on servers.
