The Raspberry Pi Zero Gets Some Quad-Core Competition from the Upcoming Radxa Zero
Borrowing the form factor but offering considerably more power, the Radxa Zero is heading to mass production in the next eight weeks.
Embedded computing specialist Radxa has unveiled its answer to the popular Raspberry Pi Zero, a considerably more powerful single-board computer imaginatively dubbed the Radxa Zero.
Designed to mimic the form factor of the Raspberry Pi Zero, the cheapest Raspberry Pi single-board computer around, the Radxa Zero is built around an Amlogic S905Y2 system on chip with four Arm Cortex-A53 processors running at 1.8GHz, an arm Mali G31 MP2 graphics processor, and the choice of 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB of external LPDDR4 RAM.
For storage, the board includes 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, 64GB, or 128GB of eMMC 5.1 flash, and hints of a possible 256GB model to follow, with a microSD slot for more or for models sold without eMMC. An on-board radio provides Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, though they're oddly model-dependent: Variants will be produced, Radxa has confirmed, with Wi-Fi 4 and Bluetooth 4.0 modules and with Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 modules.
For physical connectivity there's a Raspberry Pi-style 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, a single USB 2.0 Type-C port with On-The-Go (OTG) support, a USB 3.0 Type-C host port, and a micro-HDMI port supporting HDMI 2.1 at up to 4k60 resolution. The GPU, meanwhile, can handle H.265 and VP9 decode at 4k60. A cryptographic accelerator is also included.
Radxa has confirmed launch pricing for only four of the planned models: $15 gets you a 512MB model with Wi-Fi 4 and Bluetooth 4.0, no eMMC; $20 gets you 1GB with Wi-Fi 4 and Bluetooth 4.0, no eMMC; $30 gets you a 2GB model with 8GB eMMC and Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0; and $45 gets you 4GB of LPDDR4 with 16GB emmC and Wi-Fi 5.0 and Bluetooth 5.0.
Radxa has confirmed it will be supporting Armbian as the official operating system of the Zero, and that Amlogic provides a compatible variant of Android 9. For other operating systems the company is offering free units from an initial production batch of 100 to aid developers in getting started, with mass production of the device scheduled for eight weeks' time.
A stub page for the board has been created on the Radxa wiki, while more details can be found in the company forum.