The RK3688 will come with eight big cores and four SMALL cores, while the RK3668 is offered in a four big cores and six SMALL cores configuration. The RK3688 also offers a 32 TOPS AI accelerator, up to 200GB/s LPDDR6 memory bandwidth, a 16Kp30 video decoder, and an 8Kp60 video encoder.
The second announcement I noticed, thanks to BG5SUN on X, is about the RK182X 3B/7B LLM/VLM co-processor.
It features a multi-core RISC-V CPU, 2.5GB or 5GB “ultra-high bandwidth” DRAM, and PCIe 2.0, USB 3.0, and Ethernet interfaces to connect to the host processor. The company indicates that INT4/FP4 7B parameter models can fit into 3.5GB of RAM. They are designed for the company’s Rockchip RK3576/RK3588 SoCs, already equipped with a 6 TOPS NPU, as well as other processors.
Rockchip makes the processor. Similar to how Intel makes CPU’s. Then other board partners buy those CPU’s and put them on (usually) singleboard computers similar to a Raspberry Pi but faster and cheaper.
Yes-ish. Rockchip can choose wether it want to support its chips in Linux at all. Many of these companies just make it work and Android and anything else is just a niche market giving them a little bonus.