Rockchip’s RK3399 processor is a hexa-core, 64-bit chip that’s basically the same processor that powers the Acer Chromebook Tab 10, Asus Chromebook Flip C101 and the first-gen Samsung Chromebook Plus.
It’s also been a popular option for companies producing Raspberry Pi-like mini computers this year. The RockPro64, Renegade Elite and NanoPi M4 all use the RK3399.
Now FriendlyElec has introduced one of the smallest, cheapest options to date. It’s called the NanoPi NEO4 and it sells for less than $50.
The little computer measures just 2.4″ x 1.8″, but it has room for a bunch of ports, including:
- HDMI 2.0a
- USB 3.0 Type-A
- USB 2.0 Type-A
- USB 2.0 Type-C (for power and/or data)
- microSD card reader
- Gigabit Etherenet
There’s also a 40-pin GPIO header, a socket for an optional eMMC module, an MIPI CSI connector (for cameras up to 13MP), and two smaller GPIO connectors.
It supports 802.11ab/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 and the system comes with 1GB of DDR3-1866 memory.
FriendlyELEC says the system supports Android and Linux — it can run the company’s FriendlyCore or FriendlyDesktop 18.04 builds (based on Ubuntu 18.04), as well as Lubuntu 16.04 and Armbian. If you want to run Android 7.1.2 or Android 8.1, you’ll need to pick up an eMMC module.
The list price for the NanoPi NEO4 is $50, but right now it’s on sale for $45. Optional accessories include a heat sink, a power adapter, a 16GB eMMC module, and camera modules.
The problem with these boards are usually not that they are not powerful enough but the lack of support for linux. Sure there might be _one_ kernel that they hacked together as a proof of concept to run on their board, but getting HW accelerated video on these things – in linux – is usually a nightmare or impossible because of closed drivers. The reason why the not so powerful RasPi is so successful is because they have great support. So in a lot of cases a weaker RasPi with its HW acceleration is faster than these things with raw CPU power. As for Android – well, nobody in their right mind would want to do that. So instead of more RAM and 10 CPU cores I would like these companies to upload the full kernel source to Github.
Generally you are right but RK3399 based boards have better than average Linux support. The RK3399 is an “open” SOC at Rockchip which means that general Linux support and documentation is much better than for their other SOCs. This is partly because it was selected by Google for Chromebooks.
I believe this board comes with VPU support as well so hw accelerated video should work under Linux too (not only in Android).
Also, RK3399 has Cortex-72 cores which are way-way faster than the little/slow cores in the RasPi. Also, this also has hw acceleration for H265 while the Raspi cannot hw decode this new-gen format.
RAM is less than in other RK3399 boards which usually come with 2 or 4 GB of RAM.
I would like to see these with native PoE.
Too small, too few ports, too little ram.