RK3566 vs RK3588 — which platform for which use case
Why we default to RK3566 for general signage and reserve RK3588 for the AI digital-human capsule line.
Rockchip's RK3566 and RK3588 are both Arm-based SoCs, both supported in our Android 11/12/13 reference designs, both ship in production volumes. They are not interchangeable.
RK3566 — the workhorse
Quad-core Cortex-A55 at 1.8 GHz, Mali-G52 GPU, 2-port HDMI, 1080p/4K decode, 2 GB DDR4 default. Powers our WM, FS, OD and TS signage lines. It runs Android 11 or Debian 11 with 30+ fps on standard CMS playback. Power draw is 8-12 W at the SoC level.
RK3588 — the digital human platform
Octa-core (4× Cortex-A76 + 4× Cortex-A55) at 2.4 GHz, Mali-G610 MC4 GPU, dedicated 6 TOPS NPU, 8 GB DDR4 default. Powers our WT750SS space capsule and WT-HC hologram capsule line. The NPU is the differentiator — on-device avatar lip-sync, intent classification, and TTS run at 30 fps without cloud round-trips. Power draw is 18-25 W.
When to choose RK3588
Choose RK3588 when on-device AI inference is required: avatar animation, real-time speech recognition, computer vision (person detection, demographics), or background segmentation. Anywhere a 6 TOPS NPU is justified vs. a $99/month cloud GPU instance.
When to stay on RK3566
For everything else — content playback, kiosk UI, signage CMS — RK3566 is the right call. The cost delta is meaningful at scale: RK3588 BOM is roughly 2× RK3566.