Radxa Rock 5A RK3588S
At the end of last year I paid $177.40 for a Radxa ROCK 5A GREEN RK3588S, 8-core CPU SBC, HDMI with 8K Output, WiFi 6 Support and Gigabit Ethernet, Single Board Computer [1] from AliExpress. I got the version with 8G of RAM as 4G didn’t seem enough and I didn’t feel like paying for the 16G or 32G versions. The prices excluding postage are $106, $130, $203, and $332 for the 4G, 8G, 16G, and 32G versions respectively. The $332 version is quite reasonably priced if you need to do some big compiles on ARM64. Since then the prices have changed by a few dollars but are almost the same (variations in postage will be greater than the price changes).
They provide modified versions of Debian/Bookworm and Debian/Bullseye [2] and an Android installation. The Debian setup includes a custom kernel, bootloader, some configuration packages including for ALSA, and some firmware.
I installed Bookworm and upgraded it to Trixie (the current Debian release). There were some conflicts with some radxa packages that contained the same files as Trixie packages but didn’t have a package conflict but it was not a big deal. It would be nice if Radxa updated their setup to Trixie and it wouldn’t be that difficult for them to do so.
The board has an expansion bus which apparently can be used for NVMe. It also has an option for a EMMC module. But if you get the default configuration then the only boot device supported is a micro SD card.
One of the aims of purchasing this card is for testing 8K monitors, but it turns out that there are no TVs that will take 8K input on sale in Australia [3].
The next thing I considered doing is running it for playing movies on a 4K but it turns out to not support HDMI audio (at least not with the supplied drivers) and has no other audio support. Apparently boards like this have a common use case of digital signs where audio isn’t required.
I had this post in draft for a year because I planned to write more, but I haven’t come up with anything. It’s not an exciting device. Handy to have another ARM test and build system and handy to be able to test high resolution video with a portable device but I don’t use it for much. I guess “just works in a boring way” isn’t a bad review.