Radxa: company has just launched its latest product which is called the ROCK 5 ITX. As the name implies, it’s a Mini-ITX form factor motherboard, which in itself is rather unusual for Arm based hardware to start with. However, Radxa has designed the ROCK 5 ITX to be a NAS motherboard and this is the first time we’ve come across such a product, as most Arm based boards are either intended for hobby projects, software development or routers. This makes the ROCK 5 ITX quite unique, at least based on its form factor, as it’ll be compatible with standard Mini-ITX chassis.
The SoC on the board is a Rockchip RK3588 which sports four Cortex-A76 cores at up to 2.4 GHz and four Cortex-A55 cores at 1.8 GHz. This is not exactly cutting edge, but should be plenty fast enough for a SATA drive based NAS. The board offers four SATA 6 Gbps connectors via an ASMedia ASM1164 controller, each with an individual power connector next to it.
The RK3588 SoC also houses an Arm Mali G610MC4 GPU and a 6 TOPs NPU for machine learning acceleration. Radxa offers the ROCK 5 ITX in four different configurations with 4 to 32 GB of LPDDR5 RAM. Pricing for the 4 GB SKU wasn’t available, but the 8 GB SKU starts at US$120, with the 16 GB SKU coming in at US$160 and finally the 32 GB SKU at US$240. All SKUs appear to come with 8 GB of eMMC for the OS.
