Rock64 is a powerful Raspberry Pi rival with USB 3.0 and 4K HDR support

Pine64 has unleashed a new mini-computer on the world, with this particular Raspberry Pi-alike being a powerful little development board which supports 4K HDR10 and ships at the end of this month starting from $25 (£19, AU$33).

The Rock64 Media Board Computer is powered by a Rockchip RK3328 ARM Cortex A53, a 64-bit quad-core processor, and that’s paired with up to 4GB of system RAM (1600MHz LPDDR3). Graphics come courtesy of an integrated Mali-450MP2 GPU.

You get an HDMI 2.0a port allowing for 4K output at 60Hz and supporting HDR10 as mentioned, and there’s also a USB 3.0 connector on-board, alongside a pair of USB 2.0 ports.

Further connectivity options include a Gigabit Ethernet port, a microSD slot and eMMC module socket, along with various other interfaces such as a Pi-2 bus and Pi-P5+ bus.

As for the OS, Pine64 notes that you can use various Linux distros (Debian is mentioned), or indeed Android 7.1.

Rock trio

The entry-level Rock64 board comes with 1GB of RAM and is priced at $25 (£19, AU$33), with the 2GB model upping the asking price to $35 (£27, AU$46), and the top-end 4GB option will run you to $45 (£35, AU$59). You can order now, with the devices set to start shipping on July 31.

The original Pine 64 mini-computer board was released well over a year ago now, and as we saw recently, the company has another really interesting project on the boil: the Pinebook.

This is a Linux-powered laptop built around a Pine A64 board which will likely run Debian or a distro based on it (such as Ubuntu or similar), and features an incredibly cheap price tag. You can order the 14-inch version of this notebook now, with shipping set to begin mid-July (although the cheaper bargain basement 11.6-inch model isn’t ready yet).

Via: Neowin