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Raspberry Pi-style Renegade Elite runs Android Oreo on six-core, 4K board

If you're specifically not looking for a Raspberry Pi, the Renegade Elite could be the board of choice.
Written by Liam Tung, Contributing Writer
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The Renegade Elite will run on the Rockchip RK3399.

Image: Libre Computer

Libre Computing, the maker of a Rockchip-powered Raspberry Pi-shaped board called Renegade, will soon launch a beefed-up model dubbed Renegade Elite.

Whereas the $35 Renegade competed with the Raspberry Pi on price and maintained its form factor, the Renegade Elite is a board of a different sort.

It will launch on an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for $100 in July and then will be available in August generally for about $120, according to Liliputing. With accessories, the board could cost around $200.

Compared with the Renegade, the Renegade Elite features a faster Rockchip processor, more ports, additional Type-C ports, and, instead of a single 40-pin header, it has a 60-pin PCI-E expansion header, and a 60-pin low-speed header.

The six-core Rockchip RK3399 CPU in the Renegade Elite consists of two ARM Cortex-A72 cores and four ARM Cortex-A53 cores, as well as a four-core ARM Mali-T860 GPU. The original Renegade featured a slower Rockchip RK3328 chip.

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The Renegade Elite is the latest in a string of higher-powered 2018 boards to use the Rockchip RK3399, including the RockPro64 and the $100 Odroid-N1.

However, the Odroid-N1 has just been canceled due to problems with RAM supplies from Samsung and SK Hynix. An N2 board is now in the planning and may have a new, faster processor that hasn't been announced yet.

Other core features of the Renegade Elite include 4GB DDR4 RAM, two USB Type-C ports both of which support DisplayPort for two-display setups, while one supports power delivery.

There's also an HDMI 2.0 port, Gigabit Ethernet with optional power-over-Ethernet support, three USB Type A ports, a microSD card slot, an infrared receiver, and real-time clock with battery backup.

Libre Computer says the board can run Android Oreo or Linux 4.19 and above, or a Rockchip variant with the Linux kernel 4.4.

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