MangoPi has just released the MQ-Quad, a Raspberry Pi Zero sized board featuring a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor. Supported by 1GB of DDR3 RAM, WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities this board is shaping up to be quite a well featured Pi Zero “clone”. In terms of pricing, the MQ-Quad is currently listed on Aliexpress for around £35.
The Allwinner H616 processor uses the 64 bit architecture of the four Arm Cortex-A53 cores alongside a Mali-G31 MP2 GPU. This GPU supports OpenGL ES 3.2 and Vulkan 1.1. In regards to connectivity, there are two USB-C ports on the board, one mini HDMI, a micro SD card slot, a Raspberry Pi compatible 40 pin header and a FPC connector for extra expansion (ethernet, USB etc).
The full specifications of the MQ-Quad are as follows:
- SoC: Allwinner H616
- CPU: 4x Arm Cortex-A53 @ up to 1.5GHz
- GPU: Mali-G31 MP2 with OpenGL ES 3.2 and Vulkan 1.1 support
- RAM: 1GB DDR3
- Connectivity:
- Micro SD card slot for storage
- 2x USB-C ports
- 1x mini HDMI
- WiFi 4 – 802.11 b/g/n
- Bluetooth 4.2
- 40-pin Raspberry Pi header
- FPC connector (18-pin)
- Dimensions:
- Raspberry Pi Zero form factor
- 65x30x5mm
- Power:
- 5V via GPIO header or USB-C port
At the moment, software images are provided for Tina-linux, Ubuntu and Android 10 and these are available here.
This board is very similar to MangoPi’s previous Raspberry Pi Zero sized board, the MQ-Pro, which was instead powered by the Allwinner D1, a single core RISC-V based processor. The at-launch software support of the MQ-Quad is significantly better than the MQ-Pro was due to the MQ-Quad’s Arm architecture.