Radxa Dragon Q6A Arm SBC gets official Windows 11 preview

19 Replies to “Radxa Dragon Q6A Arm SBC gets official Windows 11 preview”

1. This SBC’s CPU is the Qualcomm Dragonwing QCS6490.
   So not a Snapdragon.
   And thus the news is that Windows for ARM runs on this non-Snapdragon … ?

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   1. The main news is that there’s now an affordable Arm SBC that should run Windows 11 relatively well.

      I suppose Qualcomm reuses many of the IP blocks from Snapdragon on the DragonWing parts.

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      1. This is basically a relabeled Snapdragon 732G.

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         1. Wrong it’s either dedicated silicon or a 780G built in 6nm instead of 5nm

            The CPU it’s based on the Snapdragon 778G/780G, 4XA78 + 4XA55 cores, with one prime core, and 3 lower clocked A78, and the usual 4 A55

            While the GPU is clearly based of the Snapdragon 780G (768 shaders, the 778G+ has 512)

            The 732G is based on A76+A55 and has a lower tier GPU, with 256 shaders

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         2. Nop, is Remake the Snapdragon 778+

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   2. QCS6490/QCM6490 are the ‘IoT variants’ of SC7280 (Snapdragon 7c+ Gen 3): https://fosstodon.org/@z3ntu/112411935529064161

      As such since IP blocks are almost identical (except clockspeed, maybe core cont and interconnection IP blocks) they share OS support automagically. WoA doesn’t ship with a whitelist of SoC names but boots whatever UEFI/ACPI enabled thingy tries to as long/far as driver support allows.

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      1. This isn’t specific to the QCS6490, it’s Qualcomm’s entire catalogue, the same IP blocks recycled and rebadged for nearly a decade.
         And good luck with drivers, since Qualcomm provides virtually no public documentation.

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2. Yes, for once we should thank Microsoft, enforcing ARM64-only actually prevents any drift.
   Otherwise we’d probably already be seeing a Qualcomm Windows on ARMv7 demo, given how obsolete this ARMv8-based SoC already is, nearly 10 years old at the ISA level.

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3. Didn’t it already run on RPi4 ? I think we said this in the past. Also, just curious, my understanding is that W11 on x86 wants a TPM chip and demands that you have an accouunt on their site. Is it also the case on Arm, or are these installs simplified ? Not that am interested, as I still don’t understand what people are trying to do with this painful family of operating systems, but I’m wondering if a simplified accessibility compared to x86 could encourage users to try it there, or if one really has to suffer from the Stockholm syndrom to use this.

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   1. My sentiments exactly. In the small board and embedded space who cares about Windows, when it’s running loads of useless privacy invading background services that hog up huge bandwidth and will eat up battery life and resources. Windows can’t even do well on gaming handhelds against Linux, so what is the use case on even more limited hardware. Foolish for people to believe Microsoft will give any attention to fine tune for, in their mind, lowly iot devices.
      This is Qualcomm flailing around because of the disaster of Windows on Arm laptops. Further more this was their second attempt, making big promises to corporate financials they’ve figured it out this time around. Now what. Buying out Arduino and hyping Windows for SBC? Buying out Ventana and talking up riscv? Qualcomm is all over the place now. These are tactics to divert attention about their huge losses from poor laptop sales. Well the jig will be up soon and dumb naive investors are going to find out Qualcomm misled about being over extended and over exposed.

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   2. > Didn’t it already run on RPi4 ?
      Yes, but without GPU drivers, so it relies on software rendering.

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      1. OK, so the Q6A could indeed improve the experience of those insisting to run windows on small hardware for whatever sadomasochist reasons. Thus the article is more about “if you really really care about windows try the Q6A” rather than “if you own a Q6A, windows is now an option”.

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         1. It’s more to do with the fact that for many users Linux is a difficult and complex text based (terminal) OS were doing everything is an ordeal.

            Even for those who use SBC’s might be more attuned to programming with a strong knowledge of Linux there are those who are not.

            Having access to Windows (regardless of its flaws) is the path of least resistance and you have access to its vast software library.

            Linux is not an alternative to Windows, despite attempts to dress it up as one, the only real alternative’s would be Haiku, ReactOS or MacOS none of which are every going to run on this SBC or most others.

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            1. Powershell, WIndows Terminal, … You can also use a keyboard with Windows, It is even highly recommended.

            2. It’s an interesting perspective, because for me (and a number of people I know), windows is just incomprehensible. You don’t know where to search to do even basic things, you don’t understand what it’s doing nor what it expects from you. And it’s no secret that people running on it spend their time looking for software to download from the net to improve their experience, most of the time possibly just to replace something they already have without even knowing about it, or something that could only correspond to a config tweak they just ignore, be it an alternate layout for the keyboard, a tool that cleans up old files on disk, deletes their cookies and browsing history, a file decompressor, and for devs even serial terminals to connect over USB, tools to write an image to a USB disk, etc. Only stuff that makes no sense to fetch from somewhere else, especially when an OS comes with gigabytes of stuff where you could expect all of this to be there by default, otherwise what are those gigabytes?

               Nowadays my perception of windows is that it’s just a boot loader to start a browser to escape that totally closed and limited world. It’s the same purpose as ChromeOS finally, but much heavier and with all the hooks needed to get infected by ransomware in minutes.

               I remember when I had NT4 about 25 years ago, it was the era where people were spending their whole Sunday fixing their windows installation, with CDs spread on the desk, and often re-installing multiple times graphics drivers, mouse drivers, storage drivers, sound drivers, then fixing inconsistencies, then installing applications etc. And nowadays I still occasionally meet people who explain me they spent their last Sunday healing the PC, so I feel like in 25 years nothing changed on that front. Maybe people just believe that it’s normal to have to care that much about their PC’s health while in fact they’re caring about their operating system’s health and that should not happen. They wouldn’t have to do that in either Linux or MacOS, yet they believe they need windows to have a browser to connect to facebook and to google docs.

         2. A relatively cheap SFF computer that, presumably, triple boots Linux, W11 and Android via UEFI images supplied by the vendor/community with actual semi-decent driver support from Qualcomm, Google and Microsoft.

            I am not seeking to buy one of these but am not going to bemoan its existence given that ALL of my personal x86-64 devices have been obsoleted by Windows 11 but in some point the future may have a scenario which requires a current Windows machine.

            (I do have a W11 work laptop but that’s heavily locked down by my employer.)

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            1. “scenario which requires a current Windows machine” is no longer a thing. I dropped this OS in 1998. By then certain things were missing or the equivalents were of lower quality (e.g. staroffice, gimp, etc). The last time I used windows was at a customers’ in 2013 and since then I’ve never missed it. In fact nowadays microsoft realized that they were lagging behind linux so much that they decided to integrate it into windows as WSL to try to limit the massive exode. So it always makes me laugh to see people install windows just to use linux on it, given that it requires 10 times the resource to achieve the same result in more time…

               And for the rest, I don’t miss anti-virus/anti-malware that slow everything down, I don’t miss “defrag” nor “regedit”.nor proprietary printer drivers which lock you out after a number of printed pages, nor the install tools that force you to register on their site before clicking “next”, nor the ads-filled software that want you to pay to get rid of ads while their software just does nothing exceptional, nor unrecoverable disk drives whose NTFS is unfixable after 3 bad sectors, nor their crippled GUI that doesn’t support virtual screens to arrange your windows by activities. Let me really stress it loud again, it’s rare that people run native apps on their PC nowadays, most of them only run stuff in browsers and don’t have to suffer from all this pain anymore.

            2. There are still some corner cases where users need to switch to Windows.

               In some reviews, I have no choice but to use Windows, most recently for a 3D scanner, since the company would only provide Windows and macOS software. It also happens with 3D printers, laser engravers, and CNC routers, although there’s usually an option for a Linux program. However, it’s not always directly supported by the vendors, so it may complicate things.

               Another example is for office suites. For documents with complex formatting shared between several members of a team or a customer, you can’t really mix programs like LibreOffice and Microsoft Office, as the formatting will be messed up. My previous boss once spent a few hours fixing a file I edited in LibreOffice, and eventually asked people to only use Office…

            3. > In some reviews, I have no choice but to use Windows, most recently for a 3D scanner, since the company would only provide Windows and macOS software. It also happens with 3D printers, laser engravers, and CNC routers, although there’s usually an option for a Linux program. However, it’s not always directly supported by the vendors, so it may complicate things.

               But for such semi-professional use cases it’s not very likely that running them under an emulator on a sub $100 SBC will work fine nor will be supported by the vendor either. These are cases where one would rather buy a MacMini and run the macOS version of the software.

               > Another example is for office suites.

               Office suites are no longer used locally, they’re use on centralized servers which permit multiple users to work together on a document nowadays, so they are browser applications. And while individual users used to get a pirated copy of msoffice, nowadays they just don’t even go through this complex process, they just use google docs for free.

               > For documents with complex formatting shared between several members of a team or a customer, you can’t really mix programs like LibreOffice and Microsoft Office, as the formatting will be messed up. My previous boss once spent a few hours fixing a file I edited in LibreOffice, and eventually asked people to only use Office…

               This is not even specific to libreoffice (which I agree has been a pain). At the customer I was working for long ago, they had msoffice everywhere and were exchanging word, excel and poorpoint presentations. Between exactly same versions coming from the exact same installation on same hardware they regularly managed to have rendering and formatting issues on certain machines. I remember once getting a table with a black-on-black font where I couldn’t read values. And instead of trying to fix the problem, they would spend hours arguing whose setup was right and whose was wrong, trying to count the number of “works for me here” in e-mail responses to decide whom it was to fix it. I however agree that {start,open,libre}office<->msoffice has always been just approximative, and my first encounter of it left me with the memory of an angry customer who didn’t appreciate not being able to read my report 🙂

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