Embedded computing specialist Radxa has introduced its newest single-board laptop designs, taking inspiration from the Raspberry Pi Zero to construct the Radxa Zero 3W and 3E — boasting USB Sort-C connectivity, elective eMMC storage, and a quad-core processor with devoted neural processing unit (NPU) accelerator for synthetic intelligence on the edge.
Shamelessly drawing inspiration from the Raspberry Pi Zero W kind issue, proper all the way down to a 40-pin general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) header, the Radxa Zero 3W, delivered to our consideration by CNX Software program, is constructed across the Rockchip RK3566 system-on-chip.
Radxa is making ready to launch a brand new low-cost single-board laptop on the Raspberry Pi Zero footprint: the Radxa Zero 3W. (📷: Radxa)
This offers the board 4 64-bit Arm Cortex-A55 processor cores operating at as much as 1.6GHz, just a little decrease than the 1.8GHz in rival implementations, an Arm Mali G52-2EE graphics processor, a imaginative and prescient processor supporting 4k60 H.264/H.265/VP9 decoding and 1080p100 H.264/H.265 encoding, and a neural processing unit (NPU) delivering a claimed 0.8 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute for edge-AI duties.
To this, Radxa has added the customer’s selection of 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB LPDDR4 reminiscence, plus 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB of elective eMMC 5.1 flash storage along with the standard microSD slot at one finish of the board. There is a micro-HDMI connector help 1080p60 shows, a MIPI Digicam Serial Interface (CSI) connector, and two USB Sort-C ports — one doubling as the facility enter and providing USB 2.0 On-The-Go (OTG) connectivity and the opposite appearing as a USB 3.0 host.
The Radxa Zero 3E matches the Zero 3W spec-for-spec, however swaps the radio for a wired Ethernet port. (📷: Radxa)
The board additionally features a radio, hidden beneath a steel defend at one finish, delivering Bluetooth 5.0 and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi 4 by means of both an on-board antenna or an exterior antenna linked to a uFL connector — although Radxa has advised this can be upgraded to a Wi-Fi 6 module when the {hardware} begins to ship. Curiously, there’s additionally the choice of a wired connection: the Radxa Zero 3E shares the identical options because the 3W however swaps out the radio chip for a full-size gigabit Ethernet port with help for Energy-over-Ethernet (PoE) with the addition of an elective add-on board.
The Radxa Zero 3W is now out there to pre-order on ALLNET China, beginning at $15 for the 1GB variant with no eMMC rising to $65 for the 8GB mannequin with 64GB eMMC; on the time of writing the Zero 3E was nonetheless listed on Radxa’s web site as “coming quickly.”
