Raspberry Pi Zero-inspired SBC with 8-core SoC and up to 16 GB of RAM launched by Radxa

The Raspberry Pi Zero is an incredibly compact design, making it the perfect choice for projects with space limitations. Radxa clearly has this segment in sight, having launched the Cubie A7Z SBC (single-board computer) with relatively powerful silicon.

At its core, the Radxa Cubie A7Z SBC is powered by the Allwinner A733 SoC with two Cortex A76 cores and six Cortex A55 cores. This chip is almost as powerful as some older flagship smartphone SoCs, making it perfectly viable for hobbyist projects. The A7Z SBC is tiny, as can be expected from its Raspberry Pi Zero (Zero 2 curr. $21.41 on Amazon) inspired form factor, coming in at just 65 x 30 mm, which is a lot smaller than its larger sibling, the Cubie A7A.

The SBC can be equipped with up to 16 GB of LPDDR4/X memory, and up to 512 GB of storage (UFS 3.0). The  I/O is decent, featuring micro HDMI 2.0b, microSD slot, USB 3.1 Type-C (with DisplayPort), USB 2.0 Type-C, and a 40-pin GPIO header. A PCIe Gen3 FPC is also present, surprisingly. Wireless is taken care of by WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3. Other notable details regarding the SBC are listed below:

• NPU with 3 TOPS (INT8, INT16, FP16, FP32 support)
• 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB, 12 GB, or 16 GB of LPDDR4/X RAM
• 64 GB, 128 GB, 256 GB, or 512 GB storage
• 4K60 video output (micro HDMI)
• 4-lane or 2x 2-lane MIPI CSI connector (for cameras)
• OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 3.0, Vulkan 1.3 support
• Debian and Android 13 support

The base variant of the Radxa A7Z SBC with 1 GB of memory and no GPIO header will start at just $15, which is certainly quite affordable. The product is already on sale globally, available from Arace and AliExpress.