Radxa Cubie A7A is a single board computer (SBC) powered by an Allwinner A733 octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 SoC with a 3 TOPS AI accelerator and up to 16GB LPDDR5 memory.
Radxa came back to the Allwinner SoC family after the silicon vendor committed to improving open-source support, starting with the Radxa Cubie A5E SBC powered by an Allwinner A527/T527 SoC. But this was only the start, and we were promised a more powerful Allwinner A733 SBC before moving to the Allwinner A838 down the road. The Allwinner A733 board is now available. Meet the Radxa Cubie A7A.
Radxa Cubie A7A specifications:
- SoC – Allwinner A733
- CPU
- Dual-core Arm Cortex-A76 @ up to 2.00 GHz
- Hexa-core Arm Cortex-A55 @ up to 1.79 GHz
- Single-core RISC-V E902 real-time core
- GPU – Imagination Technologies BXM-4-64 MC1 GPU
- VPU
- 8Kp24 H.265/VP9/AVS2 decoding
- 4Kp30 H.265/H.264 encoding
- AI accelerator – Optional, up to 3 TOPS NPU
- CPU
- System Memory – 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 12GB, or 16GB LPDDR5 @ 4800 MT/s
- Storage
- 128Mbit SPI flash (Winbond W25Q128JWPIQ) for bootloader
- MicroSD card slot
- eMMC or UFS module support
- Display interfaces
- HDMI 2.0b port
- 4-lane MIPI FPC connector
- Camera interface – 4-lane MIPI CSI connector
- Audio – Line out on header, HDMI audio output
- Networking
- Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port using Maxio MAE0621A transceiver; PoE support
- Dual-band WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 module (Quectel FCU760K)
- USB
- 1x USB 3.0 host port
- 3x USB 2.0 host ports
- 1x USB 2.0 OTG Type-C port
- Expansion
- 40-pin GPIO header
- PCIe Gen3 x1 FPC connector
- Misc
- FEL button
- RTC battery connector
- Power Supply
- 5V/4A via USB-C connector
- Optional PoE module via 4-pin header
- Dimensions – 85 x 56 mm
Radxa has posted some basic documentation on the product page, including a product brief, PDF schematics, a components placement map, and 3D drawings. With regards to software, the linux-sunxi website points to Radxa BSP with Linux 5.15 and Allwinner Tina SDK 1.4.6. However, Radxa told CNX Software that a Debian 11 with Linux 5.15 will be released in the next few hours/days, and support for Linux 6.6 and mainline U-boot is being worked on. We were also told that all Radxa OS features are being ported to the Allwinner platform/SDK.
Radxa Cubie A7A board is now available on AliExpress (link may not show with an Adblocker), starting at $35.74 with 2GB RAM and up to $66.38 with 12GB RAM. I’ve also been told you can chat with them on AliExpress to get a $10 discount coupon sponsored by Allwinner, bringing the price down to as low as about $25 plus shipping.
Thanks to SunxiFan for the tip
Update: This article was first published on July 2, 2025, and updated following some software progress and availability on AliExpress.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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I’m guessing the price will be 60$ but shipping 30$.
Good old Radxa pricing tricks.
The site is sunxi (typoed as sunix).
I cannot find that CPU on the following page:
https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort
I don’t know what amlogic really promised this time, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
I’ll wait until Allwinner actually commits by actions, not words that demonstrates all round performance and compatibility with all hardware elements using open source OS’s. Once bitten by Rockchip already with their RK3588.
Allwinner is so much worse than Rockchip…
Hello, I tipped cnx-software, because I want to publicly ask @TomCubie :
Exactly 6 months since “Open Source” Cubie A5E, can you show just 1 patch Radxa sent to Linux/U-boot only 1 ?
Be honest does Radxa have the documentation / source code for the DRAM Controller of its Cubie boards?
Thank you very much!
Check Andre talks at FOSDEM.
This new board in 2025, has U-boot from 2018, nice isn’t it? 🙂
You mean the u-boot that cannot even boot from NVME? That someone from community (why am I not surprised) had to work on it? https://forum.radxa.com/t/a5e-u-boot-with-nvme-support/26362/14
Sad for this board, it looks promising but somehow i cant help but “hearing” tkaiser’s voice from deep in the background…
I understand that some people remain skeptical, but Allwinner’s open-source journey is indeed underway – maybe slower than many had hoped. Still, there are tangible signs of commitment, including:
Meanwhile, the Radxa team has also joined the effort. For example:
The road ahead may still be long, but progress is being made—step by step. If you’re passionate about this and want to see real change, now is a good time to get involved.
Nah, let’s be real here. Allwinner is just terrible. For instance, even rockchip spent years patching and improving their support for rk3588. Now you put allwinner in the picture, they basically churn out a new mpu every year. But who‘s there to provide software support? no body. There are hardly anything to do or to patch if the company themselves have no plan to actually enable any support.
The pace of change is what invariably becomes the problem and incites scepticism and mistrust.
Allwinner must come to the table with quick and concrete solutions to give any form of confidence to the consumer.
Waiting multiple years, especially with the pace of change in technologies, that can often leave something out gathering dust and ready for e-waste when the next shiny thing is released, sometimes by the same SOC manufacturer, which leads to less incentive to support older hardware.
It has become a revolving door in the SBC world, where the RPI still remains king because of continued support all round, despite hardware being less powerful than what we see on the box shifting production line in the Far East.
At some point, people just get to the point of having enough and vote with their most powerful weapon, closed wallets.
While I agree Allwinner is gradually working toward long-term support with upstreaming and the likes, I believe Imagination’s B series doesn’t support VK_EXT_host_image_copy as was made a Vulkan 1.4 core requirement meaning they won’t qualify for newer Android releases so both Allwinner and IMG will likely refocus on the new and shiny in a couple of years.
Do you have a link to the TRM
Sorry, the Tina SDK that your employee Yuntian was calling something along the lines of “utter garbage” in your Discord server? That he “is unable to produce a working distro with it” and will have to wait on mainline – that’s again entirely done by unpaid community?
> If you’re passionate about this and want to see real change, now is a good time to get involved.
Passionate about what? Spending free time working on software for your board that you’ll forget about in a few months from now?
Weren’t we supposed to see the real change from Allwinner themselves? Or you’re hoping that the community will save your little board once again?
You can’t be serious, lol.
When will you stop with this BS, Tom? You keep sinking Radxa more and more by releasing dozens of new shiny products filled with false marketing, then wonder why people no longer trust you and your partners. Same thing with the O6 based on the “upstream-friendly, first open-source” CIX which after 7 months still has 0 upstream patches merged, more firmware blobs than open code and so on.
It’s beyond ridiculous what the SBC world had become. Imagine buying a product and having to wait 5 years for it to be usable; there’s simply no such other thing. Only with “Seriously Bad Computers (SBC)” you’ll experience this.
Hey, I’m passionate, want to get involved and code for you for free, just point me to the documentation / source code for the DRAM Controller (and the video decoder/encoder). Thanks.
Please links for the 3 items you listed: git tina repo, TRM, and third party patches?
You linked *ONE* patch from @gentoo, while at the same time you post out a *LOT* of patches from @radxa for RockChip, just quick example:
https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/uboot/list/?submitter=84852&state=%2A&archive=both
I think about putting warming on your sunxi wiki pages, that you sell boards by *falsely* advertising “Open Source”.
Kudos to all Sunxi community, for their work on Allwinner A523 / A527 / T527.
Hi Tom!
I think that people have become particularly impatient with AllWinner for good reasons, one of them being their long track record, and the second one being that they’re usually making products from low-end (or aging) components, making them 1) even less worth spending time on, and 2) mosty irrelevant once finally supported because the solution is totally outdated. I remember when their H3 started to work in mainline, it was only a cortex A7 in the end, which was the lowest end chip one could still find for sale, not very appealing to use anymore by the majority of their customers. AW’s only real strength IMHO has always been super-low prices. They enabled the sub-$10 linux computer at some point. But use cases always had to be tailored to their products limitations and that was not always a win.
To answer my own question Tina sdk and TRM are under here , TRM .
What’s the reason for including the RISC-V core ?
Does it interact with arm cores in some way ?
What peripherals can it access ?
I don’t know the details, but considering the Allwinner A733 is made for (battery-powered) tablets and laptops, the RISC-V core should handle basic I/Os in standby while the Cortex-A cores are turned off/sleeping. This is done to extend battery life.
Wouldn’t this require a separate RISC-V Android/Linux kernel to be loaded?
Other heterogeneous SoCs usually run an RTOS on the small core.
What competing CPU’s might the Allwinner A733 compete with as to overall processing speed?
Does this board support UFS 4.0, or only 3.1?
> Does this board support UFS 4.0, or only 3.1?
3.0
What are the UFS read and write speeds for 3.0?
In theory, up to 2.4 GB/s:
https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/09/10/ufs-3-0-embedded-flash-to-support-full-duplex-2-4gbs-transfer/
But the UFS modules sold by Radxa are rated up to 2100 MB/s read, 1800MB/ write.
https://radxa.com/products/accessories/ufs-module/#techspec
The actual performance will depend on the UFS 3.0 implementation on the Allwinner A733.
Does ~75% of the overall benchmark performance of a Raspberry Pi 5 sound about right for the Radxa Cubie A7A?
At advertised stock frequencies, it should be about 83% of the Raspberry Pi for single-threaded benchmarks, and likely a little better than the Pi 5 for multi-thread benchmarks due to the higher number of cores (8 vs 4), even if those cores are weaker. Not sure about the GPU. The VPU might be a positive here because the Pi only supports H.265 hardware video decoding, although it’s powerful enough for software decoding with other video codecs.
Are typical desktop office applications such as LibreOffice Writer and Calc going to be mainly single-thread or multi-thread? What determines this?
Storage performance (random I/Os) and the amount of RAM (enough to avoid excessive swapping) will be more important than small differences in CPU performance for those applications.
Would 8 Gigabytes of RAM be enough here, or would 16 Gigabytes prove to be noticeably beneficial in such applications?
It depends on the user. Some people comment that they are happy using a mini PC running Lubuntu with 4GB RAM, but I’m struggling with 16GB on Ubuntu with Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, and LibreOffice at the same time. If you tend to multitask, open multiple files in LibreOffice, then the more memory, the better.
The 16GB RAM version is coming in a next batch.
I’am curious if radxa will make some case for it or other case is compatible with it. This board looks like mix of various rpi feature:
3B HDMI port
4B USB Ethernet layout, USB-C power port
5B PCI-connector, fan/heatsink connector hole and power connector
I got the Rock 4D and 5C, and my solution was to just get a Raspberry Pi 3 çase and using a Dremel and a file, I enlarged the USB micro B port to USB C size, and cut away some plastic to make the Rock 5C layout fit in the case (Rock 4D fit perfectly).
Not the best solution, but it works. Also Pi 3 cases are so cheap nowadays that it’s totally worth trying
Check, recent linux-sunxi irc logs,
manuals/datasheets lack most crucial parts and are wrong in others.
@cnx-software @TomCubie
please link to Linux & U-boot patches send by @radxa and @allwinnertech?
The linux-sunxi wiki pages for the 2 “cubie” boards are edited entirely by radxa staff.