Radxa Dragon Q6A is a credit card-sized SBC powered by a Qualcomm QCS6490 octa-core SoC with a 12 TOPS AI accelerator, up to 16GB LPDDR5 memory, and the usual ports found on Raspberry Pi-like single board computers, such as gigabit Ethernet, four USB ports, HDMI video output, and a 40-pin GPIO header.
The board also features an M.2 Key-M socket for SSD storage, a WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 wireless module, a MIPI DSI display interface, three MIPI CSI connectors, a connector for an eMMC or UFS flash module, a microphone input connector, and an RTC battery connector.
Radxa Dragon Q6A specifications:
- SoC – Qualcomm QCS6490
- CPU – Octa-core Kryo 670 with 1x Gold Plus core (Cortex-A78) @ 2.7 GHz, 3x Gold cores (Cortex-A78) @ 2.4 GHz, 4x Silver cores (Cortex-A55) @ up to 1.9 GHz
- GPU – Adreno 643L GPU @ 812 MHz with support for Open GL ES 3.2, Open CL 2.0, Vulkan 1.x, DX FL 12
- DSP – Hexagon DSP with dual HVX and 4K HMX
- VPU – Adreno 633 VPU up to 4K60 decode for H.264/H.265/VP9, Up to 4K30 encode for H.264/H.265; Support for HDR10 and HDR10+ playback
- Spectra ISP – 64 MP / 36 + 22 MP / 3×22 MP at 30fps ZSL; 192 MP non-ZSL
- AI – 6th gen Qualcomm AI Engine that combines Compute Hexagon DSP with dual Hexagon Vector, eXtensions (HVX), Hexagon Co-processor (Hexagon CP) 2.0, and Hexagon Tensor accelerator for up to 12 TOPS of AI performance
- System Memory – Up to 16GB LPDDR5
- Storage
- MicroSD card slot
- M.2 M-Key socket for SSD
- SPI NOR flash for bootloader
- eMMC and UFS module connector
- Video Output
- HDMI port
- 4-lane MIPI DSI connector
- Camera Inputs
- 2x 2-lane MIPI CSI connectors
- 1x 4-lane MIPI CSI connector
- Audio
- 3.5mm headphone jack
- Microphone input connector
- HDMI audio out
- Connectivity
- Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port with optional PoE support
- Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 with two u.FL antenna connectors
- USB
- 1x USB 3.1 Type-A OTG port
- 3x USB 2.0 Type-A ports
- Expansion
- M.2 M-Key socket for SSD
- 40-pin Raspberry Pi compatible header
- Misc – RTC battery connector
- Power supply
- USB Type-C PD input
- Power input header
- Dimensions – 85 x 65 x 20mm
Radxa provides Ubuntu 24.04 “Noble” images, as well as instructions (from the Qualcomm website) explaining how to install Qualcomm Linux on the documentation website, where you’ll find various information to get started and additional technical information. Radxa also mentions mainline Linux support and multiple OS support in a post on X. There, we also learn that it’s faster than the popular Rockchip RK3588 for most workloads: 1.3x single-core, 1.15x multi-core, 2x GPU, and 2x NPU.
It’s like a smaller version of the RUBIK Pi 3 SBC, also based on QCS6490, but in a Pico-ITX form factor. The QCS6490 SoC found in the Dragon Q6A is also basically the same as the QCM6490 powering the Fairphone 5, just without a 5G modem, and other SBC vendors are preparing Qualcomm QCS6490 and QCS8850 boards too. Following their recent plan to acquire Arduino, it looks like Qualcomm may start to take the maker market more seriously.
Radxa mentions a starting price of $59.50 for the 4GB version on X/Twitter, but the Dragon Q6A has just launched on AliExpress with the following price options before taxes and shipping:
- $62.07 with 4GB RAM (out of stock)
- $71.97 with 6GB RAM
- $83.28 with 8GB RAM
- $103.08 with 12GB RAM (out of stock)
- $124.29 with 16GB RAM (out of stock)
Updated: The article was first published on April 16. 2025, when we were informed about it in a post on Weixin, and updated following the launch on AliExpress
Thanks to Paul for the tip.
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.
Support CNX Software! Donate via cryptocurrencies, become a Patron on Patreon, or purchase goods on Amazon or Aliexpress. We also use affiliate links in articles to earn commissions if you make a purchase after clicking on those links.
Nice, you got this news earlier than radxa shared anything about it 😀
Radxa shared it, but only in Chinese. I got the news through the contact form on the website.
It all comes down to pricing I would say.
How is the linux opensource support of adreno gpus VS the arm valhall’s?
If the adreno support is good this can be a nice upgrade over the rk3588.
On paper QCS6490 has fully mainline Linux support from Qualcomm (unlike Rockchip) so it’s great news that there’s SBC other than RPi that provides mainline support.
Rpi doesn’t provide mainline linux support on day 1. They use a fork much closer to mainline. I doubt rpi5 would be able to fully operate on true mainline right now, but I do not follow the current rp1 mainline support.
It’s Qualcomm, the price would not be low comparing to other SBC.
Hi @Tom Cubie, are you able to say whether Radxa will be making a Q6B variant in a RaspberryPi 3B+ layout?
No, we don’t have this plan for Q6B. The Radxa B form factor is Pico ITX such as ROCK 3B, ROCK 5B.
Ok, how about Q6C then?
If I look at your product selection, you do have a Rock 4B+ in a RaspberryPi 3B+ form factor but to be fair, it just maintains the same port layout as the Rock 4A, whereas the Rock 4C+ follows the RaspberryPi 4B+ layout.
The Rock 5A follows the RaspberryPi 4B+ layout, while the 5C doesn’t follow either RaspberryPi 3B+ or 4B+ layout; it’s an incompatible mix of both.
Yet the Rock 3C follows the same layout as the Rock 3A, which is the same layout as the RaspberryPi 3B+.
The thing is, the
Q6A
A7A
2A
5C
and X4
can’t be used in any case designed for the RaspberryPi 3B+ or 4B+.
So are you able to say whether there will be any Radxa Dragon SBC that follows the 3B+ layout, maybe a Q6C?
There’s also the upcoming NIO 5A, of course, which follows the RaspberryPi 3B+ layout
Thundercomm seems to list RUBIK Pi 3 on their site with price of 179 USD.
Yes, pre-orders started in January 2025, and shipping was supposed to start in March 2025. So I assume some may already have their board.
RUBIK Pi 3 has only one PWM output. Is this a CPU limitation or just the design?
Never mind, i found this Tip that explains why there is only one PWM.
“Configure any GPIO with
GP_CLKas an alternalte functionality to get clock or pulse width modulation (PWM)”The following procedure is applicable to QCS6490 SoCs.
These Chinese SBCs are a major liability. They put backdoors in even the esp32, which is only a microcontroller. There is far more incentive to sell compromised SBCs.
There’s no backdoor in the ESP32: https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/03/10/hidden-proprietary-bluetooth-hci-commands-in-esp32-microcontroller-could-pose-a-security-risk/
People are uninformed and or forget that all software is made by developers, and to facilitate our own productivity, we developers *always* make shortcuts / “backdoors” to speed up the process of development. Because time is money, and if another developer can get it done faster and cheaper, they will get the work instead of us. Security auditing and removal of those backdoors is part of the Release Management process. Cost optimisation can and does often discard proper Release Management. Cheap generally == insecure for this reason.
Then write code to create awesome mailnile support for all available 64bit risc-v boards out there. There are far too low available distros out there that have great support for risc-v boards.
That’s not true. If this sbc has blobs is bc of qualcomm, not the sbc vendor. Do you understand that this sbc has an american design SoC, don’t you? It seems thar people like you only fear chinese blobs, not american ones.
Sometimes it seems to me that these aren’t real people writing this but some trolls hired by security agencies.
I think US mind control wannabe agencies are highly gratified to see all the paranoia they’ve generated for Chinese vs US blobs. They fail as long as we remain equally skeptical to all news sources, and most trust the sources which demonstrate a healthy skepticism towards their own sources.
Freedom of speech, yeah you are making the censorship of the Chinese government look like a smart move.
How is software support for this?
Same as other Radxa?
Well, at least it’s following mainline reasonably closely, apparently there are not that many patches:
I find it snappy enough to use as a light desktop machine, so I don’t think we’re missing much from optimal support. I’m not good at testing the desktop-related stuff, though, and I could miss certain things that I’d never use and that others would find essential.
As to overall speed potential, where might it slot in with respect to the Raspberry Pi’s 4 and 5?
I never bought a Pi5 though I have a 4 which is dog slow, so IMHO anything released in the last 5 years is faster than a Pi4 anyway. That board is reasonably fast. I find it a bit sad that the SoC only has 32b memory but despite this it’s running at around 20GB/s which is roughly 10% less than my Rock5B in 64b. The cores are significantly faster (2.7 GHz+3×2.4 GHz A78 for the big ones), and the UFS flash is super fast with read speeds oscillating between 1.4 and 1.7 GB/s. For example firefox loads instantly. I could play youtube in 2.5k at 30 fps with no drop and at 60 fps with about 1 dropped frame per second, and I was told that I’m only using the CPU, I don’t understand how to switch to hardware acceleration (I’m clueless in this area that’s totally uninteresting to me). It remains barely warm in idle (around 1.05W) but can heat quite a bit under load, and a moderately sized heatsink (or better a dissipating enclosure) will be needed to save it from throttling.
While I don’t need such type of boards, if I needed one, I’d very likely pick that one instead of an RPi. It’s extremely subjective, and users who prefer a huge community over hardware efficiency might make a different choice or course.
I’d love to see if anyone has actually every got all the advertised features working on any of these SBCs. There always seens to be a huge list of “features” when they are launched, but with only 60% of them working in the first OS versions. Maybe a few others will get added in later OS updates etc., but soon enough the developers move on to newer projects and things get left un-supported. I could be wrong, but outside the raspberry pi’s I very much doubt anyone has ever had a fully working system.
It depends what you count as “advertised”. Usually there’s an NPU that nothing except a useless demo can exploit. There’s no such device on RPi so it cannot really be compared. But the rest generally works. On this board, the CPU cores work at the advertised frequency. There’s HDMI output (which works), USB (which works), GigE (which works), M.2 PCIe for SSD (which works). In fact I don’t really know what doesn’t work, I’ve not encountered something that does not work for now, I’m pretty positive about that board.
I think dave’s referring to the interesting features that differentiates this board from being just another standard SBC, e.g. the GPU, VPU, DSP, ISP, AI accelerators, the MIPI CSI interfaces, etc. The CPUs, HDMI, USB, GigE, SSDs working are great, but so can pretty much any other SBC in the same ballpark do this.
As I mentioned elsewhere on this page, I’ve already reached the limits of what I’m able to test since I just have no idea how to do that as they are features I’ve never used on any board. And such points are (sadly) not always great with certain SBCs. PCIe which doesn’t work at release date is quite common, same for USB. And CPU which can’t reach advertised frequencies are not something exceptional either, particularly with PVTM for rockchip or “oops sorry about that batch, we hoped better” from CIX. That’s why it’s important also to consult other reviews to make your opinion.
In AliExpress, shipping costs 10$, so the base price is offsetted by this.
Also, I’m guessing SIMD and GPU support is not optimal.
For instance using Yolo algorithm using SIMD will not work.
Qualcomm GPU support is quite good, see
https://x.com/mecoscorner/status/1964502652332757012
For YOLO, you can use the NPU to inference, see
https://docs.radxa.com/en/dragon/q6a/app-dev/npu-dev/yolov8-det
Even with $10 shipping cost, the value is still unbeatable.
Nice.
Intersting to see benchmark to compare FPS of Yolo on the NPU vs Yolo on RPI5 using SIMD.
Maybe this board have potential, but looks like it’s out of stock.
> Also, I’m guessing SIMD and GPU support is not optimal.
> For instance using Yolo algorithm using SIMD will not work.
For the GPU I can’t say since I have no idea how to check that. But for SIMD, why ? It’s a pretty standard A78 core. Here are the feature flags from cpuinfo: fp asimd evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 atomics fphp asimdhp cpuid asimdrdm lrcpc dcpop asimddp. Is anything missing ?
Just tried perf-portfolio/bytepack and it gives me the same numbers as the Orion-O6, and about half of the Ampere Altra which IIRC has double scalar unit.
According to the output, you are right looks like SIMD is supported – asimd.
Looks interesting, quite performant but not power hungry.
But not cheap, if including shipping, UFS and power adapter.
I do not have much experience with qcom boot (other than once trying to reverse engineer EDL loadable loader on poco x3 pro, to workaround their (Xiaomi’s) idiotic system in which you can’t reflash even their official signed system via EDL without blessing from who knows who), but is this sold with unlocked boot? How is the boot experience?
Can we just pop a custom U-Boot/TF-A build somewhere and it will get picked up by boot rom without having to be signed? Are some blobs needed for DRAM init? Is something preloaded to SPI-NOR memory? If blobs are needed, does qcom have public distribution system for them, akin to rkbin repo Rockchip has, or how do regular schmucks like me get updates?
According to https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250929-radxa-dragon-q6a-v5-0-aa96ffc352f8@radxa.com/, it seems to have a “modified version of the Qualcomm Linux boot firmware, which is stored on the onboard SPI NOR flash” which supports booting EFI based bootloaders from the storage. Now whether is has secure boot enabled or supports booting in EL2 mode for getting KVM to work, no idea.
^ this
Lol I love how the genius that is Megi calls themself a “regular schmuck”
The qualcomm bootchain is quite complicated. The documents can be found at:
https://docs.qualcomm.com/bundle/publicresource/topics/80-70014-4/bootloader.html
Qualcomm distributes the firmware via Yocto:
https://github.com/qualcomm-linux/meta-qcom-hwe/tree/kirkstone/recipes-firmware/firmware
Canonical also distributes the firmware:
https://ubuntu.com/download/qualcomm-iot
With Radxa OS you can update the SPI firmware with rsetup.
U-boot is quite early on Qualcomm platform:
https://www.linaro.org/blog/initial-u-boot-release-for-qualcomm-platforms/
Thank you very much for detailed answer.
Sorry, but I am not interested in performance SBC or expensive boards without at least 2.5G network.
https :// radxa . com / products / accessories / dual-2-5g-router-hat
(remove the spaces; otherwise the hyperlink is likely to get hit by CNX’s spam filter)
What is the Radxa-labeled IC?
RA620 is a Radxa customized DP-to-HDMI bridge chip, it’s in mainline kernel:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/8/22/345
There also needs to be 32 GB, or 64 GB options as well, or even more. I would like to see how fast gpt-oss-120b, gpt-oss-20b, Llama 3 70B, Gemma-3-27B, or some stable diffusion models run on this board. But 16 GB doesn’t cut it for me. But more TOPs is always a good thing.
Looks like 32GB would be the max. :
https :// www . qualcomm . com / internet-of-things / products / q6-series / qcs6490
(remove the spaces otherwise the URL is likely to get hit by CNX’s spam filter)
Apparently this already has full Armbian support and will run the unpatched mainline Linux kernel from 6.19