Radxa have announced that it has updated its Raspberry Pi alternative, Rock Pi 4 line of single-board computers with the Rockchip OP1 processor, onboard eMMC storage, and a pre-installed version of Twister OS to create the new Rock Pi 4 Plus family of products. Via CNX-Software.
- Rockchip OP1 big.LITTLE hexa-core processor (2x Arm Cortex-A72 @ upto 2.0 GHz, 4x Cortex-A53 @ upto 1.4 GHz) a Mali-T864 GPU
- MicroSD card
- M.2 socket for NVMe SSD
- HDMI 2.0a up to 4K @ 60 Hz
- Camera connector for camera (possibly the Raspberry Pi official camera)
- Gigabit Ethernet with PoE support (Model B and additional HAT required)
- Dual-band 802.11ac WiFi 5, Bluetooth 5.0 (Model B)
- 2 x USB 3.0 ports
- 2 x USB 2.0 port
- 40 Pin GPIO
- Real Time Clock
- USB C PD
There are two models of the Rock Pi 4 Plus at launch, the Model A and Model B, that can both be configured with either 2GB of LPDDR4 memory and 16GB of onboard eMMC storage or 4GB of LPDDR4 memory and 32GB of onboard eMMC storage.
We noticed on the Aliexpress listing that the primary difference between the Model A and Model B is that the latter offers wireless connectivity out of the box and POE support via a HAT.
The inclusion of the community created Twister OS is an interesting addition. Twister OS has been with us for around a year and has seen some success as an alternative to Raspberry Pi OS. It is a solid operating system that comes with plenty of extras.
Radxa did say these new models will be 11% faster than their predecessors thanks to the OP1. It's not clear how that would be the case, however, because OP1 appears to be a brand name for the RK-3399 SoC used in the original models. Radxa may have upgraded the Rock Pi 4 Plus to the RK-3399Pro, which adds a 2.4 TOPS NPU to the base SoC, but that doesn't mesh with the company's claim that the "OP1 brings faster performance on both CPU and GPU" to the new models.
Radxa said all of the original Rock Pi 4 accessories will be compatible with the Rock Pi 4 Plus. The new models are supposed to be available via AliExpress, Allnet, and Amazon, but at time of writing the storefronts only offer the Rock Pi 4 Plus Model B.
