Radxa Unveils the NPU-Equipped Zero 3W and Wired Ethernet Zero 3E SBCs, Starting at $15
Radxa lets you choose between Wi-Fi/Bluetooth and wired Ethernet connectivity, an unusual feature in a Zero footprint board.
Embedded computing specialist Radxa has announced its latest single-board computer designs, taking inspiration from the Raspberry Pi Zero to build the Radxa Zero 3W and 3E — boasting USB Type-C connectivity, optional eMMC storage, and a quad-core processor with dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) accelerator for artificial intelligence at the edge.
Shamelessly drawing inspiration from the Raspberry Pi Zero W form factor, right down to a 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, the Radxa Zero 3W, brought to our attention by CNX Software, is built around the Rockchip RK3566 system-on-chip.
This gives the board four 64-bit Arm Cortex-A55 processor cores running at up to 1.6GHz, a little lower than the 1.8GHz in rival implementations, an Arm Mali G52-2EE graphics processor, a vision processor supporting 4k60 H.264/H.265/VP9 decoding and 1080p100 H.264/H.265 encoding, and a neural processing unit (NPU) delivering a claimed 0.8 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute for edge-AI tasks.
To this, Radxa has added the buyer's choice of 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB LPDDR4 memory, plus 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB of optional eMMC 5.1 flash storage in addition to the usual microSD slot at one end of the board. There's a micro-HDMI connector support 1080p60 displays, a MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) connector, and two USB Type-C ports — one doubling as the power input and offering USB 2.0 On-The-Go (OTG) connectivity and the other acting as a USB 3.0 host.
The board also includes a radio, hidden beneath a metal shield at one end, delivering Bluetooth 5.0 and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi 4 through either an on-board antenna or an external antenna connected to a uFL connector — though Radxa has suggested this may be upgraded to a Wi-Fi 6 module when the hardware begins to ship. Interestingly, there's also the option of a wired connection: the Radxa Zero 3E shares the same features as the 3W but swaps out the radio chip for a full-size gigabit Ethernet port with support for Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) with the addition of an optional add-on board.
The Radxa Zero 3W is now available to pre-order on ALLNET China, starting at $15 for the 1GB variant with no eMMC rising to $65 for the 8GB model with 64GB eMMC; at the time of writing the Zero 3E was still listed on Radxa's website as "coming soon."