The good folks at Turing Pi sent me a trio of RK1 modules to put through their paces, to go along with the single unit I bought myself. And the TLDR, if you need some real ARM processing power, and don’t want to spend an enterprise budget, a Turing Pi 2 filled with RK1s is a pretty compelling solution. And the catch? It’s sporting the Rockchip RK3588 processor, which means there are challenges with kernel support.
For those in the audience that haven’t been following the Turing Pi project, let’s recap. The Turing Pi 1 was a mini ITX carrier board for the original Raspberry Pi compute module, boasting 7 nodes connected with onboard Gigabit.
That obviously wasn’t enough power, and once Raspberry Pi released the CM4, the Turing Pi 2 was conceived, boasting 4 slots compatible with the Nvidia Jetson compute units, as well as the Raspberry Pi CM4 with a minimal adapter. We even covered it shortly after the Kickstarter. And now we have the RK1, which is an 8-core RK3588 slapped on a minimal board, pin compatible with the Nvidia Jetson boards.
The story about Linux
Now, it has been a while since Turing sent me these devices. The main reason is that Linux support was broken in a couple of important ways. I’ve spent many hours over the last six months trying to debug these issues, and was really quite excited when I could finally boot the stock installers of Fedora 41, Ubuntu 24.10, and latest OpenSuse Tumbleweed on the RK1. The most notable issue is that mainline Linux completely failed to see the N ..
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