Rockchip RK3588
RockchipApplication-processor SoC from Fuzhou Rockchip rather than a board. It is an octa-core Arm design pairing four Cortex-A76 with four Cortex-A55, a Mali-G610 MC4 GPU and a 6 TOPS triple-core NPU supporting INT4, INT8, INT16, FP16, BF16 and TF32, with up to 32GB of LPDDR4X or LPDDR5 and PCIe 3.0. It is the silicon behind boards including Orange Pi 5, Radxa Rock 5B and Khadas Edge2.
Openness
3 high confidence- toolchain
- partial (NPU SDK on GitHub but proprietary RKNN license + prebuilt blobs, rknpu kernel driver open)
- datasheets
- public (full TRM + datasheet public, no NDA)
- blobs
- required (proprietary GPU/NPU firmware)
- retail
- distributor (commercial through Rockchip's module and board partners)
- form_factor
- chipset (application-processor SoC, not a board)
Rockchip publishes a brief datasheet for the RK3588. The RKNN toolkit that targets its NPU ships under Rockchip's own license, which bars reverse engineering, and its DDR, BL31 and OPTEE boot firmware ship as prebuilt binaries rather than source.
- https://github.com/airockchip/rknn-toolkit2/blob/master/LICENSE recorded 2026-08-13
"RKNN SDK License" - a Rockchip proprietary agreement granting use only for applications compatible with Rockchip products and forbidding decompiling or reverse-engineering the Software
- https://github.com/rockchip-linux/rkbin recorded 2026-08-13
Rockchip's own "Firmware and Tool Binarys" repository - prebuilt SPL/DDR/UsbPlug/BL31/BL32/OPTEE boot binaries distributed as binaries rather than source
- https://www.rock-chips.com/a/en/products/RK35_Series/2022/0926/1660.html recorded 2026-08-13
"6TOPS NPU, triple core, support int4/int8/int16/FP16/BF16/TF32 acceleration"; 8nm process, quad-core Cortex-A76 + quad-core Cortex-A55; ARM Mali-G610 MC4
- https://www.rock-chips.com/uploads/pdf/2022.8.26/192/RK3588%20Brief%20Datasheet.pdf recorded 2026-08-13
Rockchip's own RK3588 brief datasheet, downloadable from rock-chips.com with no registration or NDA - block diagram, quad Cortex-A76 + quad Cortex-A55, Mali-G610 MP4, High Performance NPU, LPDDR4/LPDDR4X/LPDDR5 quad-channel
- https://www.t-firefly.com/products/core-3588j-8k-ai-core-board-rockchip-rk3588-new-gen-8-core-64-bit-processor recorded 2026-09-12
a module partner selling the part commercially - "Core-3588J 8K AI System on Module RK3588 SOC 4G RAM+32G ROM" listed at $289.00 with an Add to cart path
Adoption
5 high confidencePowers a large multi-vendor set of single-board computers and modules, including Orange Pi, Radxa, Khadas, FriendlyELEC and Firefly, and is broadly supported in community Linux. Armbian's community comparison tabulates five RK3588 and RK3588S boards from five different vendors.
- https://forum.armbian.com/topic/26398-video-comparing-rk3588-sbcs-nanopi-r6s-khadas-edge2-radxa-rock5b-mekotronics-r58-mini-r58x-4g-orange-pi-5/ recorded 2026-10-08
comparison table of Khadas Edge 2 Pro, NanoPi R6S, Radxa Rock5B, Mekotronics R58 Mini and R58X-4G and Orange Pi 5, all on Rockchip RK3588 or RK3588S
Capability
4 high confidenceRockchip's 6 TOPS NPU runs generative workloads on-chip, with the RKLLM toolkit shipping demos for models such as Qwen2.5-VL-3B, InternVL3-1B and DeepSeek-OCR.
- https://github.com/airockchip/rknn-llm recorded 2026-08-13
rkllm-toolkit and rkllm-runtime for the Rockchip NPU, with RK3588 Series listed and w8a8 demos for Qwen2.5-VL-3B, Qwen3-VL-2B, InternVL3-1B and DeepSeek-OCR
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/airockchip/rknn-llm/main/README.md recorded 2026-09-29
rknn-llm README: "RKLLM Runtime provides C/C++ programming interfaces for Rockchip NPU platform" and lists "RK3588 Series", "InternVL2-1B/InternVL3-1B", "DeepSeekOCR"
- https://www.rock-chips.com/a/en/products/RK35_Series/2022/0926/1660.html recorded 2026-09-29
Rockchip page: "6TOPS NPU ，triple core, support int4/int8/int16/FP16/BF16/TF32 acceleration" and "8nm process, quad-core Cortex-A76 + quad-core Cortex-A55"
Verified 2026-09-29, except some scores, still awaiting re-confirmation