Radxa Unveils a Compact Single-Board Qualcomm QCS6490 SBC for Edge AI Work: The Dragon Q6A
Not yet formally announced, the Dragon Q6A is being used at the heart of a development competition in China.
Embedded computing specialist Radxa has unveiled a Raspberry Pi-style single-board computer (SBC) built around Qualcomm's QCS6490 system-on-chip — delivering a claimed 12 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of performance for on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) workloads: the Radxa Dragon Q6A.
"[The] Radxa Dragon Q6A [is] a high-performance embedded computing platform designed for industrial IoT [Internet of Things], edge intelligence, and smart terminal scenarios," the company says, in translation from the original Chinese, of its latest device. "[We are] aiming at various applications such as robots, industrial automation, AI boxes, smart cities, etc."
The new board hasn't been formally announced by Radxa itself yet, but was unveiled as part of a Chinese-language contest for edge artificial intelligence development brought to our attention by CNX Software. "As one of the partners of this event," the competition's organizers explain, in translation, "Radxa brings its latest flagship product, Radxa Dragon Q6A, to fully empower developers to build the next generation of edge smart terminals!"
The Raspberry Pi-format SBC is built around Qualcomm's QCS6490 system-on-chip, giving it a Kyro 670 CPU core with one Arm Cortex-A78 core running at up to 2.7GHz, three cores running at 2.4GHz, and four Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 1.9GHz, an Adreno 643L graphics processor, an Adreno 633 vision processor, a Spectra image signal processor, a Hexagon digital signal processor, and a "Qualcomm AI Engine" that delivers a claimed total of 12 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of minimum-precision compute. To this, Radxa has added up to 16GB of LPDDR5 memory.
Elsewhere on the board is a single HDMI 2.0 port good for 4k60 plus a MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) with dual-display support, two two-lane and one four-lane MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) inputs, analog audio connectivity, a gigabit Ethernet port with optional Power-over-Ethernet support, on-board Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 with external antenna connections, one three USB 2.0 Type-A and one USB 3.1 Type-A port, an M.2 M-key socket, microSD Card slot, eMMC and UFS module connectors, and a 40-pin Raspberry Pi-compatible general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header.
More information is available on the competition website; pricing and general availability have yet to be announced by Radxa itself.