radxa News - CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

May 28, 2025May 31, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Radxa ROCK 4D SBC – A Raspberry Pi lookalike powered by Rockchip RK3576 SoC with 6 TOPS AI accelerator

Radxa ROCK 4D is yet another Rockchip RK3576 SBC, but offered in a credit card form factor similar to the Raspberry Pi 3 model with the usual 40-pin GPIO header, Gigabit Ethernet ports, and four USB ports. We first noticed it when we covered the Radxa Dual 2.5G Router HAT, and I’ve just seen it added to the Linux 6.15 release, so I thought it might be a good time to cover it, especially since it’s already for sale on Allnet and AliExpress starting at $31 plus shipping. Radxa ROCK 4D specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3576 or RK3576J (industrial-grade version) CPU – Octa-core CPU with 4x Cortex-A72 cores at 2.2 GHz, 4x Cortex-A53 cores at 2.0 GHz GPU – Arm Mali-G52 MC3 GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0, and 3.2, OpenCL 2.0, and Vulkan 1.2 NPU – 6 TOPS (INT8) AI accelerator with support for INT4, INT8, INT16, […]

May 26, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linux 6.15 Release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.15: So this was delayed by a couple of hours because of a last-minute bug report resulting in one new feature being disabled at the eleventh hour, but 6.15 is out there now. Apart from that final scramble, things looked pretty normal last week. Various random small fixes all over, with drivers as usual accounting for most of it. But we’ve got some bcachefs fixes, some core networking, and some mm fixes in there too. Nothing looks particularly scary. And this obviously means that the merge window opens tomorrow as usual, and I see the usual people being proactive and having sent me their pull requests. It’s memorial day tomorrow here in the US, but like the USPS, “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” – nor memorial day – stops the merge window. [ Actually, thinking back […]

May 20, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Radxa NIO 5A credit card-sized Mediatek Genio 520 SBC showcased at Computex 2025

Radxa NIO 5A is an upcoming Mediatek Genio 520 SBC in credit card/Raspberry Pi form factor that should offer a more affordable entry into the MediaTek Genio family than Radxa Nio 12L equipped with a powerful Mediatek Genio 1200 SoC. There’s no public information on the web about it, but I was sent some photos of the board from Mediatek’s booth at Computex 2025, and we know it’s powered by the Genio 520 octa-core Cortex-A78/A55 SoC with a 10 TOPS AI accelerator and comes with “large memory and high-capacity storage”. Let’s see if we can derive more detailed specs from the photos and other public information about the SoC. Radxa NIO 5A specifications (preliminary): SoC – Mediatek Genio 520 (MT8371) CPU – Octa-core processor with 2x Arm Cortex-A78 up to 2.2 GHz (Commercial) or 2.0 GHz (Industrial) 6x Arm Cortex-A55 up to 2.0 GHz (Commercial) or 1.8 GHz (Industrial) GPU […]

May 1, 2025April 30, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Cerebro clusterboard supports up to four NVIDIA Jetson, Raspberry Pi CM4/CM5, or Radxa CM5 modules (Crowdfunding)

Cerebro is a modular board / clusterboard designed to take up to four system-on-modules such as NVIDIA Jetson SO-DIMM modules, Raspberry Pi CM4 or CM5, or Radxa CM5. The board integrated a BMC for intercommunication between the CPU modules. The Cerebro was designed out of frustration as the team at Sparklab Solution could not find a solution where boards would work together seamlessly. While there are other clusterboards for Raspberry Pi Compute modules, the Cerebro motherboard provides more flexibility with three M.2 sockets per node, a built-in BMC and optional expandable BMC, KVM support between each node, dual Ethernet, a 10 Gbps USB 3.2 port, and more. Specifications: Compute Modules 4x SODIMM-260 slots Compatibility Nvidia Jetson Orin NX/Nano Raspberry Pi CM4/CM5 via adapter Radxa CM5 via adapter Supports mix and match of different models Storage 2x M.2 key-M slots per node (8x in total) for NVMe SSD 1x MicroSD card […]

April 30, 2025April 30, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Radxa Orion O6 mini-ITX motherboard gets Arm SystemReady SR v2.5 certification

Radxa Orion O6 mini-ITX motherboard powered by a CIX P1 12-core Cortex-A720/A520 SoC has just obtained Arm SystemReady SR (ServerReady) v2.5 certification, meaning it’s been shown to run unmodified several OS images such as Windows and Ubuntu. I’ve already tested a Debian 12 image modified by Radxa on the Orion O6, but one of the goals of the platform was to provide a universal UEFI + ACPI firmware to boot any Arm ISO released by OS vendors, for instance, the Ubuntu Desktop ISO for Arm 64-bit architecture downloaded directly from the Ubuntu website. The Arm SystemReady SR certification is a step in the right direction, as it means the Orion O6 has passed a number of tests showing it can boot several off-the-shelf OS images. We’ll find Radxa’s Orion O6 listed on the Arm SystemReady Compliance page among boards from other manufacturers, as well as the Radxa ROCK Pi 4B+, […]

April 16, 2025April 16, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 15 Comments

Radxa Dragon Q6A – A Qualcomm QCS6490 Edge AI SBC with GbE, WiFi 6, three camera connectors

Radxa Dragon Q6A is an upcoming 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 will also feature 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 […]

April 11, 2025April 11, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Radxa Dual 2.5G Router HAT adds 2.5GbE networking and M.2 NVMe storage support to Raspberry Pi 5-compatible SBCs

The Radxa Dual 2.5G Router HAT is an expansion board adding 2.5GbE networking and an M.2 PCIe x1 socket for NVMe SSD storage to the Raspberry Pi 5 and compatible SBCs with a PCIe FFC connector. We had previously seen Raspberry Pi 5 HATs with 2.5GbE such as the Pineberry HatNET! 2.5G, or even one with 2.5GbE and NVMe SSD (52Pi W01 U2500 HAT), but the Radxa Dual 2.5G Router HAT is the first to implement two 2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports to enable routing, and also features an NVMe SSD as a bonus. Radxa Dual 2.5G Router HAT specifications: Supported SBCs – Raspberry Pi 5, Radxa ROCK 2F, Radxa ROCK 2A, Radxa ROCK 5C, the upcoming Radxa 4D (RK3576), and potentially others PCIe Switch – ASM2806 PCIe 3.0 switch chip with PCIe Gen3 x2 upstream and four PCIe 3.1 lanes downstream up to 8GT/s Storage – 1x M.2 M-Key socket […]

March 30, 2025March 31, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

Radxa Orion O6 Preview – Part 2: Debian 12 – What works, what doesn’t

I went through an unboxing and Debian 12 installation on the Radxa Orion O6 at the end of January, but decided to work on other reviews since software support still needed to be worked on. Since then, there’s been some work done, but no new image released. After waiting for almost two months, I’ve decided to carry on with the review by testing the Debian 12 image in a way similar to the Rock 5B SBC preview I did with Debian 11 in 2022 to check what works and what doesn’t on the Orion O6 at the time of the review. That will involve testing all ports, including 5GbE networking and the PCIe slot with an (old) NVIDIA graphics card, running some benchmarks, and also trying the Debian 12 image with a self-built Linux 6.13 kernel using ACPI instead of UEFI for the default image. Orion O6 SBC benchmarks on […]