PINE64 Launches the Quartz64 Zero, a Cut-Down Single-Board Computer Hitting a Sub-$15 Price Point
Thin single-board computer design cuts a few corners from the Quartz64 Model B design to come in at a tempting price point.
Open hardware specialist PINE64 has launched a new single-board computer, hitting a sub-$15 price point for the "community edition" by trimming a few parts: the Quartz64 Zero.
"It is capable of driving a single 4k display at 60fps and the GPU uses the open source Panfrost driver," PINE64 writes of its latest single-board computer design, brought to our attention by CNX Software. "It also has the benefit of running very cool, even without a heatsink and under a sustained load. The Quartz64 Zero is a low cost board suitable for various commercial project application and guarantee supply at least until year 2028."
The new Zero is far from the first entry in the Quartz64 family. Back in 2021 the company launched its first version, the Quartz64 Model A — followed in June the following year by the Model B, both considerably delayed owing to component shortage problems. The Quartz64 Zero, though, is the lowest-cost model in the range — achieved by leaving a fair number of footprints unpopulated.
The Quartz64 Zero is powered by a Rockchip RK3566T system-on-chip, giving it four Arm Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 1.6GHz, down from 1.8GHz on the other Quartz64 models, an Arm Mali-G52 2EE Bifrost graphics processor running at up to 800MHz, and a neural processing unit (NPU) coprocessor delivering 0.8 tera-operations per second (TOPS) at minimum precision — though this latter feature is, for some reason, not listed in PINE64's official specs. To this, the company has added 1GB of LPDDR4 memory — but very little else.
Unpopulated footprints on the board show where USB and Ethernet ports would have been, but to keep costs down the Quartz64 Zero drops to just one USB 3.0 port and no Ethernet. For networking, there's on-board IEEE 802.11b/g/n/ax Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.4 radios, while expansion can be handled by a single PCI Express lane on a custom connector or a 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header. For storage there's a microSD Card slot and room for an optional eMMC module, and a full-size HDMI connector delivers 4k60 10-bit video.
As is usual for PINE64, the Quartz64 Zero is being launched as a "community edition" first — meaning that while the hardware has been finalized, software is still very much a work in progress. The board is, in theory, compatible with operating system images released for the earlier Quartz64 parts including Armbian, DietPie, Plebian, and Manjaro Arm Linux distributions, NetBSD, and Android 11, but it is unclear at the time of writing whether modifications will be required for a successful boot and stable operation.
The Quartz64 Zero is now available to order on the PINE64 store, priced at $14.99.