Fuzhou, China-based Rockchip makes Raspberry Pi alternatives such the Rock Pi 4.
OKdo, has announced that boards powered by Rockchip will soon be available. This may be good news for Raspberry Pi fans looking for alternatives to the popular microcomputer.
RS Group, owner of OKdo, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation have ended their nearly decade-long partnership.
Why does this matter?
OKdo believes its technical experience, technology, ecosystem partners, supply chain, and worldwide distribution channels will improve CSB availability.
The ROCK 4 SE is a cheaper version of Radxa’s ROCK 4C Plus board with a six-core ARM processor.
The motherboard has two 1.5GHz Cortex-A72 cores, four 1.0GHz Cortex-A53 cores, ARM’s T860MP4 Mali GPU, and 4GB of 64bit LPDDR4 RAM.
Raspberry PI has had shortages in the past year, thus today’s news may please hardware tinkerers and python developers.
Eben Upton, head of Raspberry Pi’s trading arm, called the shortages “extremely awful”
“We sold the same amount of Raspberry Pis last year as the year before, but we started with a half-million client backlog and ended with several million,” he said.
OKdo’s Co-Founder and CTO believes Rockchip design partner Raxa can withstand the supply chain turmoil.
Curtin added, “Considering Taiwan Semiconductors’ supply chain constraints, there is a high risk of stock shortages when semiconductor production is primarily in Asia or in one wafer fab.”
Rockchip’s need for a wide variety of wafer types “was one of the primary reasons we worked with Radxa in design, manufacturing, and distribution.”