ROCK PI N10 RK3399Pro SBC Sells for $99 and up

Rockchip RK3399Pro processor is based on the popular Rockchip RK3399Pro hexa-core Arm Cortex-A72/A53 processor plus an embedded neural processing unit (NPU) delivering up to 3 TOPS for AI acceleration.

So far you had to spend over $200 to get either Toybrick RK3399Pro board or 96Boards RK3399Pro development kit to get started with the processor. Some other companies announced their own RK3399Pro SBC such as Pine64  RockPro64-AI, or Khadas Edge board, but those are not available yet. But there’s now a more affordable Rockchip RK3399Pro SBC courtesy of Radxa’s  Rock Pi N10 available on Seeed Studio in three variants:

• $99 model A with 4GB RAM (3GB for CPU/GPU + 1GB for NPU), 16GB eMMC flash
• $129 model B with 6GB RAM (4GB for CPU/GPU + 2GB for NPU), 32GB eMMC flash
• $169 model C with 8GB RAM (4GB for CPU/GPU + 4GB for NPU), 64GB eMMC flash

Rock Pi N10 specifications:

• SoC – Rochchip RK3399Pro hexa-core big.LITTLE processor with 2x Cortex A72 cores up to 1.8 GHz, 4x Cortex A53 cores @ 1.4 GHz, and an Arm Mali-T860 MP4 GPU with OpenGL ES 1.1 to 3.2, OpenVG1.1, OpenCL 1.2 and DX 11 support, and 8-/16-bit NPU delivering up to 3 TOPS
• System Memory – 4 to 8 GB LPDDR3 memory shared between Arm Cores and NPU
• Storage – 16 to 64 GB eMMC 5.1 flash, MicroSD card slot up to 128 GB, and M.2 NVMe SSD connector up to 2TB
• Video Output & Display I/F
  • HDMI 2.0 up to 4K @ 60 Hz
  • 2-lane MIPI DSI via FPC connector
  • eDP (embedded DisplayPort) header
  • Dual independent display support (and maybe triple, TBC)
• Camera – 2-lane MIPI CSI supporting up to 8MP camera
• Audio
  • 3.5mm headphone jack
  • 2-pin Microphone header
  • 24-bit/96 kHz HD audio codec
• Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet with optional PoE support, optional Rock Pi wireless module
• USB – 1x USB 3.0 OTG port with  switch for host/device switch, and 2x USB 2.0 host ports
• Expansion
  • M.2 socket for NVMe SSD
  • M.2 socket for WiFi card
  • 40-pin color-coded I/O expansion header with 1x UART, 2x SPI, 2x I2C, 1x PCM/I2S, 1x SPDIF, 1x PWM, 1x ADC, 6x GPIO, 2x 5V DC power in, 2x 3.3V power pin
  • RS232 header
• Debugging – 1x micro USB port for access to the serial console
• Misc – Power, Reset and Recovery keys, IR receiver, RTC battery connector
• Power Supply – USB Type-C port supporting USB PD and
  Qualcomm Quick Charge (QC3.0/2.0)
• Dimensions – 100mm x 100mm

ROCK Pi N10 supports Debian 9 Desktop, Ubuntu 18.04 server, Fedora Desktop, and Android 8.1, as well as AI development tools such as Rock-X set of rapid AI components, RKNN-API C API, and RKNN-Toolkit Python API of RKNN (Rockchip Neural Network).  You’ll find all the information to get started and hardware documentation on the wiki.

Competitors to Rock Pi N10 include NVIDIA Jetson Nano ($99) and Orange Pi 4B ($70) all of which are capable of hardware AI acceleration, and we previously reported that RK3399Pro board was slightly faster than Jetson Nano when using MobileNetV2 model. Orange Pi 4B is the cheapest of the lot, but some people have had issues getting access to Gyrfalcon SDK and even forums…

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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