Rockchip RK3566 and RK3568 — Cortex-A55 IoT and gateway SoC

The Rockchip RK3566 and RK3568 are two variants of the same silicon die, separated by binning and peripheral fusing. Both ship a quad Cortex-A55 cluster at 1.8 to 2.0 GHz, a Mali-G52 EE GPU, a small NPU, and an industrial-friendly peripheral mix that includes PCIe Gen3, dual gigabit Ethernet, multiple SDIO, USB 3.0, and a usable serial peripheral set. They are the workhorse parts of the current Rockchip lineup for IoT gateways, network-attached storage, digital signage, light edge inference, and a wide range of single-board computers. This page covers the silicon details, board landscape, software stack, and where they sit against MediaTek Genio 510 and NXP i.MX 8M Mini.

RK3566 versus RK3568 — what changes

The two parts come off the same wafers. They are binned and fused for different markets. The headline differences:

The peripheral differences are real but most lanes are multiplexed — the same physical SerDes lane on the RK3568 can be configured as PCIe, SATA, or USB 3.0 depending on the board design. The RK3568B variant adds higher-temperature operation (industrial -40 to +85 C) for embedded products.

Boards that use these parts

The Odroid M1 and Radxa ROCK 3A are the most common choices for NAS and home-server use cases because of the SATA and PCIe support. The NanoPi R5S is a popular target for OpenWrt-based routers because of its three GbE ports.

Real-world use cases

The RK3566 and RK3568 cover roughly the same workload tier as the Raspberry Pi 4 — Linux-class application processing, light edge inference, GPU-accelerated UI rendering — at meaningfully lower cost on the SoC level. Common deployments:

• Home NAS — Odroid M1 with two SATA SSDs and OpenMediaVault or Unraid.
• OpenWrt router and edge firewall — NanoPi R5S with three GbE ports.
• IoT gateway — RK3568 with Modbus over RS-485, MQTT bridge to AWS or Azure.
• Digital signage — RK3568 with 4K HDMI output and CMS client.
• Light edge inference — RK3568 with RKNN running MobileNet or YOLOv5n.
• Industrial HMI — Odroid M1 industrial variant with Qt-based UI.

Mainline kernel support

The RK3566 and RK3568 are the best-supported Rockchip parts in mainline Linux. By kernel 6.6 essentially all peripherals work upstream:

• CPU, cache, PSCI — full
• GPU — Panfrost driver works for Mali-G52, with reasonable performance
• Display — DRM/KMS support for MIPI-DSI, HDMI, eDP, LVDS
• Camera — partial; MIPI-CSI and ISP support landing piece by piece
• USB, SDIO, eMMC, NAND — full
• PCIe — full
• Ethernet — full
• SATA — full
• NPU — none mainline; vendor RKNN runtime only

For most NAS, router, and gateway use cases, mainline kernel 6.6 or later is sufficient. For products that need NPU inference, the vendor 5.10 kernel is the practical choice.

Device-tree snippet — enabling PCIe and SATA

The RK3568's SerDes lanes are multiplexed. To enable PCIe Gen3 ×2 on a Radxa ROCK 3A carrier, the device tree needs to assert the right combo PHY mode and bring the PCIe controller up. A minimal overlay:

&combphy0_us {
    status = "okay";
};
 
&pcie3x2 {
    status = "okay";
    reset-gpios = <&gpio2 RK_PD6 GPIO_ACTIVE_HIGH>;
    vpcie3v3-supply = <&vcc3v3_pcie>;
    num-lanes = <2>;
    pinctrl-names = "default";
    pinctrl-0 = <&pcie30x2m1_pins>;
};
 
&pcie3x2_phy {
    status = "okay";
    rockchip,pcie30-phymode = <PHY_MODE_PCIE_AGGREGATION>;
};
 
&sata2 {
    status = "okay";
    phys = <&combphy2_psu PHY_TYPE_SATA>;
    phy-names = "sata-phy";
};

The PHY_MODE_PCIE_AGGREGATION setting on the PCIe PHY combines two ×1 lanes into a single ×2 link. To run as PCIe ×1 plus SATA ×1, set PHY_MODE_PCIE_NANBNB instead.

Software stack

For a NAS application, Armbian + OpenMediaVault is a common stack. For an industrial gateway, Debian Bookworm with a custom application service over systemd. For a router, OpenWrt is the natural fit.

# Quick path: download Armbian image for Odroid M1 and write to microSD
wget https://redirect.armbian.com/region/EU/odroidm1/Bookworm_current_minimal
xz -d Armbian_*_Odroidm1_bookworm_current_*.img.xz
sudo dd if=Armbian_*.img of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync
sudo sync
 
# Boot, then:
sudo armbian-config   # configure network, hostname, locale
sudo apt update && sudo apt install openmediavault   # turn it into a NAS

Comparison with the alternatives

The RK3568's strengths are price, ethernet capacity, and mainline kernel support. The Genio 510 wins on NPU performance and fab process. The i.MX 8M Mini wins on industrial longevity and the NXP support ecosystem. For hobby and prosumer products, RK3568 is usually the right call. For long-lived industrial deployments, i.MX 8M Mini remains the safer choice.

Cross-references

• Rockchip landing — vendor overview.
• Rockchip RK3588 — flagship Rockchip with bigger CPU and NPU.
• MediaTek Genio 510 — direct competitor with stronger NPU.
• NXP i.MX — industrial-grade alternative.
• Cortex-A55 — core architecture details.
• rockchip.com.cn RK3568 product page (external).
• Radxa ROCK 3A documentation (external).
• Hardkernel Odroid M1 (external).
• Armbian for Rockchip (external).