Radxa ROCK 5B Blue Edition debuts as cut-price alternative to ROCK 5B with 4 GB and 8 GB RAM variants
Radxa has released a new version of the ROCK 5B (curr. US$155 on Amazon), a single-board computer (SBC) it launched in January 2022. Now, the company has created the ROCK 5B Blue Edition, a variant that maintains all core features of the standard version, including a Rockchip RK3588 chipset. For reference, Rockchip equips the RK3588 with four ARM Cortex-A76 CPU cores clocked at 2.4 GHz and a further four Cortex-A55 cores restricted to 1.8 GHz.
Also, the Rockchip RK3588 utilises a Mali-G610 MP4 GPU and a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of delivering 6 TOPS of performance. Additionally, the ROCK 5B Blue Edition comes with a choice between 4 GB and 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM. For some reason, Radxa has decided against offering the Blue Edition with a 16 GB of RAM variant. At any rate, the SBC includes 16 MB SPI Flash, an eMMC connector, a MicroSD card slot, an M.2 M Key connector, and SATA support via Radxa's Penta SATA HAT.
Connectivity remains a strong suit too, with 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, Micro HDMI, USB Type-A, USB Type-C and Power over Ethernet (PoE) all supported. Please note that the latter requires a separate PoE HAT. Moreover, Radxa continues to include a 40-pin GPIO header for connecting external devices. Likewise, the ROCK 5B Blue Edition can run Android and Ubuntu, among other operating system images. Currently, the new SBC starts at US$79.50 with 4 GB of RAM, undercutting the standard ROCK 5B by approximately US$50. Alternatively, Arace Tech sells an 8 GB SKU for US$99.50. Please see Arace Tech's product listing and Radxa's wiki page for more details.
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