Radxa Dragon Q6A: New Raspberry Pi alternative is powered by Qualcomm SoC

Radxa is launching a new single-board computer. The so-called Dragon Q6A is an SBC that can be described as an alternative to the popular Raspberry Pi. It measures 3.35 x 2.56 inches and offers a 40-pin GPIO header that is compatible with accessories for the aforementioned Raspberry Pi. Therefore, corresponding expansion boards can be hooked up, although software support may not be guaranteed in some cases.

The SBC is further equipped with the Qualcomm QCS6490 SoC with four Cortex-A78, four Cortex-A55 cores and an Adreno 634L iGPU. Additionally, the included NPU should offer an AI performance of 12 TOPS, which makes it possible to run some AI models locally, such as object recognition for images. Cameras can be connected via USB or MIPI CSI ports, the latter of which are fairly common in the SBC segment.

MIPI DSI and HDMI are available for image output, while network connections can be set up via Gigabit Ethernet with optional PoE support or WiFi 6. Bluetooth 5.4 is supported as well, but there is no built-in mass storage. Therefore, tinkerers will have to install eMCC, UFS modules or an M.2 SSD. Like many single-board computers, the Radxa Dragon Q6A supports microSD cards and comes with up to 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM. The manufacturer has not revealed a price or launch date yet.