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)

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…