Radxa Dragon Q6A is an Arm-based single-board PC with Windows and Linux support

by · Liliputing

The Radxa Dragon Q6A is a credit card-sized computer that looks a lot like a Raspberry Pi. But it’s an interesting little device for a few reasons. One is that it has an m.2 slot with support for PCIe 3.0 x2 2230 SSDs. And another is that this little computer is powered by a Qualcomm DragonWing QCS6490 processor.

Like most single-board Computers (SBC) with Arm-based processors, the Dragon Q6A officially supported several different GNU/Linux distributions when it first launched earlier this year. But this month Radxa announced that the board now supports Windows 11 as well.

So far the company is only making “an initial release” available, which may have “some bugs of unverified features. It is intended for testing and development purposes.” But download links and installation instructions are available in the Radxa forum.

Technically Windows has supported Arm architecture for many years at this point. But so far Microsoft has only officially supported hardware with Qualcomm processors, which is why you don’t see official Windows builds for SBCs from Raspberry Pi or other models that use non-Qualcomm chips.

As CNX-Software reminds us, there are some Raspberry Pi-like systems with x86 processors like the Radxa X4, ODROID-H4+ and LattePanda IOTA that have no problem running Windows. But the Radxa Q6A is pretty unusual as an Arm-based SBC with Windows support.

The 85 x 56mm (3.3″ x 2.2″) board’s QCS6490 processor is an 8-core CPU with four Cortex-A78 CPU cores and four Cortex-A55 cores, Adreno 643L graphics, and a 12 TOPS NPU. The Radxa Q6A supports up to 16GB of LPDDR5 memory and offers several options for storage, including eMMC or UFS modules, a microSD card reader, and M.2 connector for an NVMe SSD.

Other features include an HDMI port, headphone jack, four USB Type-A ports (one USB 3.1 and three USB 2.0), a USB-C port for power, a Gigabit Ethernet port with PoE support, a 40-pin GPIO header, and several MIPI-CSI/DSI connectors.

via CNX Software