Decent competition for the popular Raspberry Pi 5

At the end of last year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation offered for sale a new model of the Raspberry Pi 5 desktop computer, which is equipped with four gigabytes or eight gigabytes of system memory and a Broadcom BCM2712 processor manufactured using 16-nanometer technology. For data recalculation, it uses four 64-bit ARM Cortex-A76 processor cores with a frequency of 2.4 gigahertz. Graphics are handled by the integrated VideoCore VII graphics core, which provides support for the OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan 1.2 graphics libraries and the advanced MESA driver.

The Rock 5A Pink Edition is an affordable version of the Rock 5A PC pre-configured with 16GB of LPDDR4x RAM. Retailing for just over $100, the Rock 5A Pink Edition is said to be powerful enough to outperform the Raspberry Pi 5, the most powerful option in the Raspberry Pi ecosystem.

As far as the available information goes, the Rock 5A Pink Edition carries over all the key specifications of the original Rock 5A computer.

Radxa equips all Rock 5A units with a Rockchip RK3588S chip and LPDDR4x RAM memory, eMMC 5.1 flash memory and a MicroSD card reader. In addition, the SBC has an M.2 E key for small SSD drives, although all drives are limited to PCIe 2.1 and SATA 3.0 speeds. The Rock 5A also has a 40-pin GPIO header, a USB Type-C port for power, and a pair of HDMI 2.1 ports.

The Rock 5A Pink Edition is available with 16GB of RAM for an MSRP of $159.