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

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).