The team at Radxa, known for its Rock Pi SBCs, has announced the development of a new SBC known as the Radxa Zero, which looks like a Raspberry Pi Zero but provides four times more CPU cores, twice the clock speed and up to four times more RAM. The most basic model is planned to retail for only $15.
The Radxa Zero will feature an Amlogic S905Y2 quad-core Cortex-A53 processor capable of speeds as fast as 2.0 GHz. For graphics, it relies on an Arm Mali-G31 MP2 GPU.
In terms of specs, these compare very favorably to the Raspberry Pi Zero, which has a 1-GHz, single-core CPU and just 512MB of RAM. However, the Pi Zero W, which has built-in Wi-Fi 4, goes for only $10. More importantly, the Pi Zero is backed by a huge support community and ecosystem of compatible products where the Radxa Zero and all other Pi clones are left in the cold.
Radxa's board will run Android and possibly some other operating systems but not Raspberry Pi OS, which automatically puts it at a huge disadvantage. With 40 GPIO pins, it could possibly work with the best Raspberry Pi HATs, but someone would need to write the software to make them work and, unless they sell a lot of units, it will be difficult to get that kind of developer support.
Over 100 boards have been produced for early devs and plans for mass production should be underway in about 8 weeks. Read more about the Radxa Zero on the Radxa forums and be sure to follow the team for production updates.
via CNX Software
