It’s pretty good for industrial applications, even if it gets a tad warm. I’m now running Proxmox ARM on it (with QEMU and ZFS support, but only one SSD) on it after I had an SSD failure on my CM3588 NAS. Setup was pretty trivial, and my notes apply to anything you can drop Debian Bookworm on: https://taoofmac.com/space/notes/2024/11/09/1940
I would like to see projects with more, and specifically more diverse and open-source friendly SoCs, based on Allwinner for lower cost stuff (Olimex-produced SBCs), Mediatek for higher price/performance (banana pi, and especially for the WiFi chipsets, it's about time we stopped with the closed Broadcom stuff)
But Rockchip is no longer selling to SBC folk & no longer participating at all in mainlining.
Theres almost no one left to buy chips from, basically. Hope everyone's happy using rpi forever, cause that's where 2025 has left us. :/
MediaTek has some Genio chips they're starting to make available but explorer boards are quite expensive. These new Cix people have an incredible looking 8x A720, which Radxa is using on an upcoming Orion O6 board. But man it is just so sad to see company after company after company collapse & disappear from making chips usable by SBC.
https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/12/21/rockchip-rk3588-main...
Rockchip employees have been upstreaming their drivers, your claim is unfounded. Just check the linux-rockchip mailing list.
Kontron (Fujitsu) have some very low-power, efficient motherboard, the Kontron K3843-B. Also, Odroid-H4+ deliver a good bang for the buck. Excellent devices for low-power NAS / server. But a different form-factor than SBC.
[Update: I’ve asked Collabora how RK3588 software development was funded. Their answer:
But to answer your question, Collabora had initially started the work on RK3588 as a strategic research and development (R&D) investment. When we looked at the SOC landscape at the time, we felt that SOC offered great potential. Since then Collabora has developed a solid relationship with the RockChip Open Source team, and others there. They have been very supportive and responsive. And they continue to do so on the RK3588 as well as everything else we are collaborating on with them. Collabora’s strategic R&D investment has been paying off since we have several OEM customers that have hired our services to further enable their RK3588 products, in all sorts of industries and product form factors.
]
https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/12/21/rockchip-rk3588-main...
Also there is apparently an arm port of proximity but haven’t tried it
I use Orange Pi 5 Plus in my home lab and I've found their builds of Debian are rock solid though a bit sus hosted in a Gdrive and pulling updates from Huawei repos instead of official. They do tend to be one or two kernel versions ahead of Armbian so it's unclear if the added stability is due to kernel version or some other patches and secret sauce. It has been quite some time since I've tried it. Ops 6.12 is well newer than the 6.7 or 8 last time I attempted Proxmox.
I've also found a lot of instability in what SSD you choose. Things are real bad on Samsung but after some research the Lexar nm790 is especially low power and this seems to have resolved my instabilities. There seems to be some kind of power handling issues on the oPi 5 Plus.
No ECC for an hypervisor running VMs is scary too.
Although ZFS is still useful even without ECC.
[1]: https://www.rock-chips.com/uploads/pdf/2022.8.26/192/RK3588%...
https://forum.radxa.com/t/lack-of-concern-for-security-in-bs...
https://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2024/03/rockchip-npu-update-1-w...
As a Rock3A owner I can say no. It may look like a real SBC but it is not.