Radxa Launches Rock Pi N10 RK3999Pro Single-Board Computer with Integrated Neural Processing Unit
Offering up to 3 TOPS of performance alongside a six-core Arm processor and Mali GPU, the Rock Pi N10 targets Nvidia's Jetson Nano.
Radxa has officially launched the Rock Pi N10, a single-board computer based around the Rockchip RK3399Pro system-on-chip (SOC) and featuring a co-processor offering up to 3 TOPS of deep-learning performance for compatible workloads.
The overall specifications of the new Rock Pi N10 aren't a million miles away from those of the recently-launched Orange Pi 4 B: Both use the RK3999, both feature a neural networking co-processor with around 3 TOPS of compute, and both start with 4GB of RAM. The Rock Pi N10, however, doesn't stop there, offering a choice of 4GB, 6GB, or 8GB of LPDDR3 memory shared between the CPU with its twin 1.8GHz Arm Cortex-A72 and quad 1.4GHz Cortex-A53 cores, the Arm Mali T860MP4 GPU, and the NPU.
Elsewhere on the board is 16 to 64GB of eMMC storage with microSD and M.2 SSD expansion options, an HDMI 2.0 port supporting up to 4k60 output. a two-lane MIPI DSI connector, 3.5mm analogue audio jack, two-lane MIPI CSI camera connector, two USB 2.0 Host and one USB 3.0 OTG ports, a gigabit Ethernet pot with Power over Ethernet (PoE) support, and support for USB Power Delivery and Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 power. As with earlier Rock Pi designs, there's also a general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header with 40 pins, including 1x UART, 2x SPI, 2x I2C, 1x PCM/I2S, 1x PWM, 1x S/PDIF, 1x ADC, 6x GPIO, and two each of 5V and 3.3V power.
In a break from what is rapidly becoming the norm in the market, the Rock Pi N10 doesn't include on-board wireless connectivity. Radxa has instead designed three add-on M.2-format boards which include Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity: The Wireless Module A1 offers single-band 2.4GHz Wi-Fi at a peak of 36Mb/s along with Bluetooth 4.2; the A2 offers dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz at up to 200Mb/s along with Bluetooth 5.0; and the A3 ups the peak throughput to 400Mb/s with Real Simultaneous Dual-Band (RSDB) support.
Seeed Studio has begun taking pre-orders for the Rock Pi N10 family with aggressive pricing: The base 4GB/16GB model sits at $99, the 6GB/32GB version at $129, and the top-end 8GB/64GB version at $169. At that price, however, it goes toe-to-toe with Nvidia's Jetson Nano — and which comes out the victor will largely depend on whether a given workload is more suitable for acceleration via the Jetson Nano's Maxwell graphics processor or the Rock Pi's NPU.
Seeed has published a comparison of the Rock Pi N10 against the Jetson Nano and the Raspberry Pi 4 on its company blog, while pre-orders for the Rock Pi N10 are available in its web shop. Radxa itself has more information on the board on its official wiki.