Comment by nubinetwork 3 months ago
The kernel/dtb support was what held me back from buying a Turing Pi 2, I'm still debating on buying something ampere based instead... the rk3588 has been out for ages, I don't see what the holdup is getting it mainlined.
Only certain SBC suppliers, namely Orange Pi, were stopped from supplying chips by Rockchip because they violated the treaty.
Rockchip employees have been upstreaming their drivers, your claim is unfounded. Just check the linux-rockchip mailing list.
When you start wanting decent RAM, SBC end up being expensive.
Kontron (Fujitsu) have some very low-power, efficient motherboard, the Kontron K3843-B. Also, Odroid-H4+ deliver a good bang for the buck. Excellent devices for low-power NAS / server. But a different form-factor than SBC.
mainline LTS is good enough to boot and perform well, but it's still missing media and NPU features. as someone who briefly worked on mainlining, I feel the biggest problem is Turing's deceptive marketing - rk3588 and SBCs in general just aren't powerful enough for popular inference workloads like LLMs, let alone training. and ARM (rather than x86) is still very limiting for self-hosting apps
Collabora, thankfully, do - https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35...
Is this really so?
[Update: I’ve asked Collabora how RK3588 software development was funded. Their answer:
But to answer your question, Collabora had initially started the work on RK3588 as a strategic research and development (R&D) investment. When we looked at the SOC landscape at the time, we felt that SOC offered great potential. Since then Collabora has developed a solid relationship with the RockChip Open Source team, and others there. They have been very supportive and responsive. And they continue to do so on the RK3588 as well as everything else we are collaborating on with them. Collabora’s strategic R&D investment has been paying off since we have several OEM customers that have hired our services to further enable their RK3588 products, in all sorts of industries and product form factors.
]
https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/12/21/rockchip-rk3588-main...
There's been solid progress.
But Rockchip is no longer selling to SBC folk & no longer participating at all in mainlining.
Theres almost no one left to buy chips from, basically. Hope everyone's happy using rpi forever, cause that's where 2025 has left us. :/
MediaTek has some Genio chips they're starting to make available but explorer boards are quite expensive. These new Cix people have an incredible looking 8x A720, which Radxa is using on an upcoming Orion O6 board. But man it is just so sad to see company after company after company collapse & disappear from making chips usable by SBC.
https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/12/21/rockchip-rk3588-main...