A possible contender for best SBC ever, has come up, and almost immediatly gone down in my estitmations.
the Rock Pi 4, visible at http://rockpi.org/
Looks like a total beast of a machine, a Raspberry config but based on a Rockchip 3399..... that's a beast...
At first glance I was salivating, I'm already falling in love with my T4 and Neo4 from Friendly arm, and a $39 RK3399 equiped chip with full ports is a bargain.
But nothing about the company behind the launch of this newcomer inspires me, its touted in the press releases as costing $39 up...nope, after a few days of being unable to find a retail supplier, it turns out the base price is closer to 68euros, exclusing postage, or heat sinks that almost certainly will be needed for an RK3399.
So its going to be around twice the price of a 3B+, but you will get about twice the power in theory, the hexacore RK3999 is extremely fast and smooth to use, and the GPU is also wonderful, though I have fears about the drivers not being fully implimented yet.
In short this is a sexy beast, but it looks like they announced it a couple of weeks too early. The sites are woeful, the retail is non existant, and no idea what the final cost is going to be. And who knows how effective performace really is until we see an OS running.
Its locked itself into its own drawer of shame, but I'll check back in a month or so to see if they've got the price, the supply and most important the software under control
