Mixtile Core 3588E is a Rockchip RK3588 SO-DIMM system-on-module with up to 32GB LPDDR4 and 256GB eMMC flash that follows NVIDIA Jetson Nano, TX2 NX, Xavier NX, and Orin Nano form factor and should work with any board made for Jetson SO-DIMM modules.
We first covered the module last April, but Mixtile is now shipping their Rockchip RK3588 module and sent us a development kit with the Mixtile Core 3588 SoM fitted with a fansink and a carrier board that looks quite similar to the NVIDIA Jetson Nano developer kit we reviewed a few years ago, although its design is closer to the new B01 developer kit as we’ll see below. We’ll start the review with an unboxing and first boot, before testing it in more detail with Ubuntu 22.04 in the second part of the review.
Mixtile Core 3588E development kit unboxing
We received the development kit fully preassembled.
It comes with a large heatsink with a PWM fan and offers the same ports as the Jetson Nano Developer Kit-B01 kit with two MIPI CSI camera connectors, a DC power jack, DisplayPort and HDMI output, four USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, a micro USB device port, and a GPIO header. So from those angles, the main difference is the cooling fan as the Jetson Nano devkit is fanless.
The bottom side is quite different than the JEtson Nano devkit with an M.2 Key M socket, an M.2 2230 socket (for wireless?), a microSD card slot, and a coin-cell battery holder for the RTC.
We can also see the board takes 9V to 19V input, an important piece of information since our kit does not come with a power adapter. Markings show it’s one of those LEETOP carrier boards we noted in some Jetson Xavier NX mini PCs. The exact model used in this kit is the Leetop A206 carrier board.
We can also see the MIPI CSI connectors from another angle and the height of the kit. I also removed the Mixtile Core 3588E module to have a closer look at both the SoM and carrier board.
There’s not that much to see here except the carrier board features a RealTek RTS5411S USB 3.2 Gen1 4-port hub controller used for some of the interfaces.
Booting Mixtile Core 3588E to Ubuntu 22.04
Since the Mixtile Core 3588E development kit does not come with any power supply, I first have to find a power source that works in the 9V-19V range. I don’t have any 12V power supply with me right now, but I do have a laptop power bank that can output 20V or 12V, so I connected the 12V output to the board after connecting an Ethernet cable, HDMI and USB cables to the CrowView laptop monitor, and two RF dongles for a wireless mouse and keyboard.
The Core 3588E module booting to what looks like an OEM install of Ubuntu. I went through the setup wizard, and could eventually confirm the system is preloaded with Ubuntu 22.04.3 using Linux 5.10 kernel from Rockchip SDK:
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jaufranc@Mixtile-RK3588E:~$ uname -a Linux Mixtile-RK3588E 5.10.160-rockchip #18 SMP Wed Dec 6 15:11:42 UTC 2023 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux jaufranc@Mixtile-RK3588E:~$ cat /etc/lsb-release DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu DISTRIB_RELEASE=22.04 DISTRIB_CODENAME=jammy DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS" jaufranc@Mixtile-RK3588E:~$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on tmpfs 1.6G 2.7M 1.6G 1% /run /dev/mmcblk0p2 113G 7.5G 101G 7% / tmpfs 7.7G 0 7.7G 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 5.0M 8.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock tmpfs 4.0M 0 4.0M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/mmcblk0p1 512M 101M 411M 20% /boot/firmware tmpfs 1.6G 60K 1.6G 1% /run/user/0 tmpfs 1.6G 76K 1.6G 1% /run/user/130 tmpfs 1.6G 68K 1.6G 1% /run/user/1000 jaufranc@Mixtile-RK3588E:~$ free -mh total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 15Gi 601Mi 13Gi 47Mi 1.4Gi 14Gi Swap: 2.0Gi 0B 2.0Gi |
We can also see the Rockchip RK3588 module used for this review comes with 16GB RAM and a 128eMMC flash. I haven’t decided what the second part of the review will look like exactly as depending on the provided documentation, I may review it as a generic Ubuntu 22.04 SBC or focus my efforts on AI workloads to try to compare it to the Jetson Nano developer kit. I’ll also attempt to move the Mixtile Core 3588E to the Jetson Nano developer kit since I think I still have it somewhere…
I could not find the developer kit showcased in this post for sale, as Mixtile only appears to offer the Core 3588E module for $109 to $278 depending on the memory and storage configuration and whether a heatsink is present, and let customers select their preferred carrier board from other sources or design their own. For reference, the module used here goes for $168, and the Leetop A206 carrier board sells for $199 on Seeed Studio (when it is in stock..), so the total price for this kit would be around $367 plus shipping and duties.
Continue reading Mixtile Core 3588E SoM review – Part 2: Ubuntu 22.04, hardware features, RK3588 AI samples, NVIDIA Jetson compatibility
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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