rockchip News - Page 13 of 20 - CNX Software

January 26, 2015January 26, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 17 Comments

Linux 3D GPU Acceleration Demo on Rockchip RK3288 based Firefly Board

Several devices and development boards based on Rockchip RK3288 processor already support Linux, usually with images based on Ubuntu, including Ugoos UM3 / UT3, Open Hour Chameleon, and Firefly-RK3288 among others. What these images lack however, is support for 2D and 3D graphics acceleration with the GPU, and hardware video decoding/encoding with the VPU. But Jas-hacks has made some progress with 3D graphics support. He has managed to add GPU acceleration via EGL/OpenGL ES bringing 3D acceleration to the platform, but 2D support is not there yet, meaning X11 still heavily relies on software rendering. But the implementation is still good enough to run the usual es2gears and glmark2-es2 benchmarks. as well as some WebGL demos in Chromium. Performance is currently underwhelming, with 50 points in glmark-es2, even a bit lower than the score (54 points) I got with ODROID-X board powered by Exynos 4412 SoC with a Mali-400MP4 GPU, […]

January 21, 2015April 25, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 29 Comments

Antutu Benchmark – Rockchip RK3288 (ARM) vs Intel Atom Z3735F

Most ARM mini PCs run Android, while mini PCs based on Intel Atom Z3735F currently all ship with Windows 8.1, so it makes comparison difficult. But since Linuxium posted triple boot instructions (Ubuntu, Android, Windows 10) for MeegoPad T01, he’s also run Antutu 5.6 on the platform, so we’ve got a comparison point. The Android image used in the Intel platform is Android-x86, and may not have been optimized for Bay Trail yet, so even though the comparison may not be perfect, it could still be interesting to find out the strengths and weaknesses of the Intel processor, against one of the fastest ARM processor found in mini PCs: Rockchip RK3288. I’ll use the Antutu 5.3 score I got with Open Hour Chameleon as a reference point. Rockchip RK3288 Intel Atom Z3735F Delta CPU Quad core Cortex A17 @ 2.0 GHz Quad core @ 1.33 GHz (Burst 1.83GHz) GPU ARM […]

January 8, 2015January 8, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 26 Comments

Rockchip RK3036 Android 4.4 TV Boxes with H.265 Codec Support To Sell for $10

Rockchip announced RK3368 64-bit processor yesterday for mid-range tablets and 4K media player, but the company also have some new ultra low cost TV box and HDMI TV stick solution with Rockchip RK3036 dual core Cortex A7 processor that will go into $9.9 TV boxes running Android 4.4. The price is most probably factory price, but that means $20 H.265/HEC capable Android media players are probably around the corner. You can already get an RK3066 TV dongle (MK808 and similar) for less than $30 in Aliexpress, so the new solution will likely decrease the price by $5 to $10. Technical specifications of RK3036 reference design: SoC – Rockchip RK3036 dual core Cortex A7 processor @ up to 1.2 GHz with Mali-400MP GPU System Memory – 256MB DDR3 or DDR3L Storage – 2GB flash. RK3036 supports MLC NAND, eMMC 4.5. Video & Audio Output – HDMI 1.4a. The chip also supports […]

January 7, 2015January 8, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

Rockchip Introduces RK3368 Octa Core Cortex A53 SoC for Tablets and 4K TV Box

Rockchip is also at CES 2015, and they’ve announced and are showcasing a new octa-core processor called RK3368 with eight 64-bit ARM Cortex A53 cores that will go into tablets and 4K UHD media players in the coming year. Most news outlet and blogs at CES only cover big brand, so all I got are a few tweets from Rockchip twitter account. The eight cores will be clocked up to 1.5 GHz, and the SoC includes an unnamed GPU with support for OpenGL ES 3.1, OpneCL 1.2 and DirectX 9.3. 4Kx2K H.265 and H.264 video decoding will be handled by the chip too, as will out HDMI 2.0 for up to 2160p @ 60 Hz video output. RK3368 tablets and media players will run Android 5.0 Lollipop. RK3368 is probably the official name for MayBach processor. I’m now fully relying on Charbax to get more details about Rockchip new processor… […]

December 31, 2014May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 17 Comments

Boot Ubuntu (Linux) or Android from an SD Card on Rockchip RK3288 Devices

There’s already a method to boot Android from an SD Card on RK3188 devices, which should work with all Rockchip RK3188 devices. Ian Morrison (Linuxium) has now provided a instructions to boot Linux or Android from a (micro) SD Card in Rockchip RK3288 based devices, leveraging work from linux-rockchip community, and especially naobsd. The Android flashing method is slightly different between RK3188 and RK3288, because most Rockchip RK3288 devices make use of eMMC flash, while older Rockchip RK3188 products feature NAND flash, and it appears Rockchip RK3xxx boot priorities (in the BootROM stored in the SoC itself) are as follows: eMMC, SD card, and NAND flash. All that means is that an updated version of the bootloader is needed which looks for a bootable SD card, and although very unlikely, your device could end up being bricked during this procedure. This is not a problem for Open Hour Chameleon since […]

December 10, 2014May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Linux 3.18 Released

Linus Torvalds released Linux Kernel 3.18 last Sunday: It’s been a quiet week, and the patch from rc7 is tiny, so 3.18 is out. I’d love to say that we’ve figured out the problem that plagues 3.17 for a couple of people, but we haven’t. At the same time, there’s absolutely no point in having everybody else twiddling their thumbs when a couple of people are actively trying to bisect an older issue, so holding up the release just didn’t make sense. Especially since that would just have then held things up entirely over the holiday break. So the merge window for 3.19 is open, and DaveJ will hopefully get his bisection done (or at least narrow things down sufficiently that we have that “Ahaa” moment) over the next week. But in solidarity with Dave (and to make my life easier too 😉 let’s try to avoid introducing any _new_ […]

November 30, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

Create-android-sdcard Script Creates a Bootable SD Card for any Rockchip RK3188 Devices

Bootable Linux SD card images for some Rockchip RK3188 devices such as MINIX NEO X7, MK809III, Tronsmart T428 have already been released this summer, and it provided any easy way to try Linux on Rockchip RK3188 devices without messing with your Android installation. But now you can create Android bootable images with any Rockchip RK3188 devices thanks to create-android-sdcard script written by Ian Morrison, as long as you have the firmware for your Android mini PC, and I don’t see why it would not even work for tablets. It allows you to try Android firmwwre before replacing your existing installation (great for developers), and it can also be a way to handle multiple users on a single device. There could be one SD card for dad, one for mum, and one for the kid, and all you have to do is to take out and replace the SD card with […]