07-12-2021, 11:32 AM
Due to the current clock layout (as of time of writing, July 2021), performance on Linux (both mainline and AFAIK bsp) is quite poor, and not reflective of what the hardware is capable of. Because of this, any benchmarks you see are likely from some Android image, which is going to be of questionable applicability.
The RK3566 comes with four Cortex-A55 cores. These are in-order cores, meaning they do not issue instructions out-of-order like modern desktop CPUs or the ROCKPro64's two "big" A73 cores. However, they use a more recent microarchitecture. So expect performance to be worse than the ROCKPro64 as you're comparing "little" cores to "big" cores. It'll however be much improved over the more directly comparable ROCK64, which uses four Cortex-A53 cores (which are the preceding cores in that line of in-order ARM "little" cores).
As for GPU, the RK3566 will be very interesting; unlike the ROCK64, it uses a newer version of the Mali IP, which means it is supported by the FOSS panfrost driver (and not the lima one). This already gets us up to OpenGL 3.1 with many extensions of more recent OpenGL versions supported. See mesamatrix for details. (In case you don't know, OpenGL versions past 3.0 are mostly collections of ratified extensions, so a GPU can support OpenGL 4.x level features in an OpenGL 3.1 context.) Of course, the newer GPU IP comes with generally improved performance across the board, though the RK3566's GPU is not a "full" Mali G52 implementation, but a cut down one with one shader core and two execution engines. It should still perform admirably and run circles around the ROCK64.
As an aside note, panfrost support means we might also eventually get Vulkan API support through the (currently very experimental and self-proclaimedly "broken") panfrost Vulkan implementation.
The NPU is a topic I won't go into as I'm not experienced in it, but as some have mentioned, it can hardware accelerate tensor operations.
From what I know, PCIe performance should be improved compared to the ROCKPro64. The RK3566 uses a licensed PCIe implementation instead of the in-house one that Rockchip used previously, which is likely going to eliminate some issues the ROCKPro64 had with stability that will allow the link to run at actual PCIe 2 speeds.
What you should be doing is comparing the Quartz64 to the ROCK64 or the PineA64, not the ROCKPro64. I suspect the comparison to the ROCKPro64 is due to the current pricing, and some of the "pro"-level features like PCIe.
The Quartz64 is most interesting as a test bed for the RK3566 SoC. The SoC's in-order cores are aimed at power efficiency, and brings with it many features aimed at mobile applications, such as a wealth of PWM pins, which I've been told are often used in mobile applications to manage power consumption of peripherals. The 22nm node it is manufactured on, while not cutting-edge, is still a denser node than what the previous Rockchip SoCs used, and therefore will also have significant power (and heat dissipation) advantages.
The RK3566 comes with four Cortex-A55 cores. These are in-order cores, meaning they do not issue instructions out-of-order like modern desktop CPUs or the ROCKPro64's two "big" A73 cores. However, they use a more recent microarchitecture. So expect performance to be worse than the ROCKPro64 as you're comparing "little" cores to "big" cores. It'll however be much improved over the more directly comparable ROCK64, which uses four Cortex-A53 cores (which are the preceding cores in that line of in-order ARM "little" cores).
As for GPU, the RK3566 will be very interesting; unlike the ROCK64, it uses a newer version of the Mali IP, which means it is supported by the FOSS panfrost driver (and not the lima one). This already gets us up to OpenGL 3.1 with many extensions of more recent OpenGL versions supported. See mesamatrix for details. (In case you don't know, OpenGL versions past 3.0 are mostly collections of ratified extensions, so a GPU can support OpenGL 4.x level features in an OpenGL 3.1 context.) Of course, the newer GPU IP comes with generally improved performance across the board, though the RK3566's GPU is not a "full" Mali G52 implementation, but a cut down one with one shader core and two execution engines. It should still perform admirably and run circles around the ROCK64.
As an aside note, panfrost support means we might also eventually get Vulkan API support through the (currently very experimental and self-proclaimedly "broken") panfrost Vulkan implementation.
The NPU is a topic I won't go into as I'm not experienced in it, but as some have mentioned, it can hardware accelerate tensor operations.
From what I know, PCIe performance should be improved compared to the ROCKPro64. The RK3566 uses a licensed PCIe implementation instead of the in-house one that Rockchip used previously, which is likely going to eliminate some issues the ROCKPro64 had with stability that will allow the link to run at actual PCIe 2 speeds.
What you should be doing is comparing the Quartz64 to the ROCK64 or the PineA64, not the ROCKPro64. I suspect the comparison to the ROCKPro64 is due to the current pricing, and some of the "pro"-level features like PCIe.
The Quartz64 is most interesting as a test bed for the RK3566 SoC. The SoC's in-order cores are aimed at power efficiency, and brings with it many features aimed at mobile applications, such as a wealth of PWM pins, which I've been told are often used in mobile applications to manage power consumption of peripherals. The 22nm node it is manufactured on, while not cutting-edge, is still a denser node than what the previous Rockchip SoCs used, and therefore will also have significant power (and heat dissipation) advantages.
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