If you’re a Raspberry Pi enthusiast looking for an alternative to the popular microcomputer, you might be pleased to know that Rockchip powered development boards are now available from UK online store OKdo.
Rockchip is a Fuzhou, China-based manufacturer that produces popular Raspberry Pi alternatives such as the Rock Pi 4 under the “Rock” brand.
The announcement passed eeNews Europeas the long-standing relationship between OKdo’s owners RS Group and the Raspberry Pi Foundation lapses after nearly a decade.
What does it mean?
OKdo said the move will increase the availability of customizable single board (CSB) computers thanks to its engineering expertise, technology, ecosystem partners, supply chain and global distribution channels.
The product range includes the ROCK 4 SE, a reduced cost version of Radxa’s ROCK 4C Plus board, using the RK3399-T six-core ARM processor.
The motherboard has two Cortex-A72 cores and four 1.0GHz Cortex-A53 cores with a performance capacity of 1.5GHz, as well as ARM’s T860MP4 Mali GPU with 4GB 64bit LPDDR4 RAM.
Today’s news might be music for hardware tinkerers or those just interested in improving their Python development skills, as the Raspberry PI has suffered some serious shortages over the past year.
exist be interviewed edge (opens in new tab), Eben Upton, boss of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s trading department, described the shortage as “very bad.”
He added: “We sold the same number of Raspberry Pis last year as we sold the year before, but we had a backlog of about half a million customers when we came in last year, and we left last year with a backlog of millions of customers.”
Richard Curtin, co-founder and CTO of OKdo, believes that Rockchip’s design partner Raxa is particularly well-suited to weather the storm of supply chain crisis.
“Considering TSMC’s recent supply chain constraints, there is a high risk of inventory shortages when semiconductor production is located only in Asia or at one fab,” Curtin said.
He added that Rockchip’s use of several different types of wafers “was one of the main attractions of our design, manufacturing and distribution partnership with Radxa.”
