Firefly AIBOX 3588S

Firefly AIBOX-3588S Embedded Fanless PC Running Linux – Introduction

Let’s interrogate the AIBOX-3588S with some familiar Linux tools.

The uname command is a utility that displays information about the current system

uname -a

The system is running kernel 6.1.118 which was released in November 2024.

Processor

inxi

The Mini PC comes with the powerful Rockchip RK3588S 8-core 64-bit processor. In specification, it’s similar to the RK3588 but the RK3588S has a few reduced features:

  • one TYPEC/DP1.4 less
  • one HDMI 2.1 TX/eDP1.4 less
  • No HDMI RX
  • three PCIE less(2x PCIE3.0 + 1x PCIE2.0), one SATA less
  • one MIPI CSI less(1x4Lane or 2×2 Lane)
  • one GMAC less(VCCIO3 Domain)

The CPU is identified as:

inxi

I’m only showing some of the processors.

Graphics

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The machine has the ARM Mali-G10 MP4 graphics. The machine is equipped with a single HDMI output port.

Here’s some benchmarks using glmark2 showing the OpenGL ES performance of the GPU. I’ll cover benchmarks in more detail in the next article in the series.

glmark2

And here’s the GPU acceleration available in Chromium. There are lots of features with hardware acceleration.

GPU Internals

There’s support for hardware decoding:

8K@60fps H.265/VP9/AVS2
8K@30fps H.264/AVC/MVC
4L@60fps AVI
1080P@60fps MPEG-2/-1/VC-1/VP8

And for hardware encoding:

8K@30fps H.265/H.264

Disk

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The eMMC provided with my machine is 32GB. Other configurations are available with 16GB, 64GB, 128GB or 256GB.

Testing speed of the eMMC

Here’s a benchmark test for the eMMC. As you’d expect, performance is much better than a microSD card.

Memory

inxi

My machine has 16GB of DDR5 RAM. It’ll be interesting to see what performance is like in RAM benchmarks. The datasheet lists alternative configurations: 4GB, 8GB, or 32GB RAM.

Audio

inxi

Audio is passed through HDMI. The machine does not have Bluetooth.

But a fanless machine is always a candidate for consuming multimedia, so I added a cheap Bluetooth USB adapter which works without needing any drivers/modules.

inxi -E

Network

inxi

The machine has a single gigabit ethernet port.

There’s no WiFi available.

Temperature

inxi -s

This temperature reading was taken with a room temperature of 27.6°C. The machine was left idle for 60 minutes before taking this reading. Let’s see how the case keeps the CPU temperature when stressed using s-tui and stress. With only passive cooling from the case, the temperature gets a bit toasty on this very hot day (by UK’s norm).

s-tui

In the next article in the series I will run a range of benchmarks on the machine.

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Design
Page 2 – Getting Started
Page 3 – Interrogation of the system

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