VAMRS Releases New RK3399-Based Development Board with the Rock960 Model C

VAMRS launched their 96Boards-compliant, RK3399-based Rock96 board last year for $99, with FriendlyARM following with a much cheaper ($49) RK3399-equipped NanoPi NEO4 a short time later. Now VAMRS has designed an even less expensive development board around the dynamic SoC with the Rock96 Model C, which retains being part of the 96Boards ecosystem.

The Rock96 Model C comes with the RK3399 SoC, which features a hexa-core big.LITTLE processor with 2X Cortex-A72 cores, 4X Cortex-A53 cores, a Mali-T860 GPU, and up to 4Gb of LPDDR4 RAM (depending on the version). It also packs a micro SD card slot (eMMC optional), HDMI 2.0 port, USB-C port (host only), and a pair of USB 3.0 ports (one host only, and one OTG).

The Rock96 Model C still retains the original’s 40-pin low-speed GPIO header (UART, SPI, I2C, I2S), 60-pin high-speed header (MIPI DSI, USB, MIPI CSI, HSIC, SDIO), and 4-lane M.2 PCI-E 2.1 connector. Connectivity is done through Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 4.0 LE with a pair of onboard antennas, and two u.FL connectors.

As you may have noticed, changes were made to memory (1Gb, 2Gb, and 4Gb options), storage (eMMC now optional), and wireless (no 2 X 2 MIMO) options from the original Rock96 board, which were meant to reduce the board’s overall cost. As far as pricing goes, Seeed Studio is currently selling only the 1Gb version of the Rock96 Model C board for $69, while VAMRS is offering all three for $69 (1Gb), $79 (2Gb), and $99 (4Gb), respectively.