Open {hardware} specialist PINE64 has launched a brand new single-board laptop, hitting a sub-$15 worth level for the “neighborhood version” by trimming a number of components: the Quartz64 Zero.
“It’s able to driving a single 4k show at 60fps and the GPU makes use of the open supply Panfrost driver,” PINE64 writes of its newest single-board laptop design, delivered to our consideration by CNX Software program. “It additionally has the advantage of working very cool, even with out a heatsink and underneath a sustained load. The Quartz64 Zero is a low value board appropriate for varied industrial mission utility and assure provide at the least till 12 months 2028.”
PINE64’s Quartz64 household has a brand new member, within the type of the cost-reduced Quartz64 Zero. (📷: PINE64)
The brand new Zero is much from the primary entry within the Quartz64 household. Again in 2021 the corporate launched its first model, the Quartz64 Mannequin A — adopted in June the next 12 months by the Mannequin B, each significantly delayed owing to element scarcity issues. The Quartz64 Zero, although, is the lowest-cost mannequin within the vary — achieved by leaving a good variety of footprints unpopulated.
The Quartz64 Zero is powered by a Rockchip RK3566T system-on-chip, giving it 4 Arm Cortex-A55 cores working at as much as 1.6GHz, down from 1.8GHz on the opposite Quartz64 fashions, an Arm Mali-G52 2EE Bifrost graphics processor working at as much as 800MHz, and a neural processing unit (NPU) coprocessor delivering 0.8 tera-operations per second (TOPS) at minimal precision — although this latter characteristic is, for some cause, not listed in PINE64’s official specs. To this, the corporate has added 1GB of LPDDR4 reminiscence — however little or no else.
Unpopulated footprints on the board present the place USB and Ethernet ports would have been, however to maintain prices down the Quartz64 Zero drops to only one USB 3.0 port and no Ethernet. For networking, there’s on-board IEEE 802.11b/g/n/ax Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.4 radios, whereas enlargement might be dealt with by a single PCI Specific lane on a customized connector or a 40-pin general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) header. For storage there is a microSD Card slot and room for an elective eMMC module, and a full-size HDMI connector delivers 4k60 10-bit video.
The board features a microSD Card slot for storage, with room for an elective eMMC module as much as 128GB too. (📷: PINE64)
As is common for PINE64, the Quartz64 Zero is being launched as a “neighborhood version” first — that means that whereas the {hardware} has been finalized, software program remains to be very a lot a piece in progress. The board is, in idea, suitable with working system photographs launched for the sooner Quartz64 components together with Armbian, DietPie, Plebian, and Manjaro Arm Linux distributions, NetBSD, and Android 11, however it’s unclear on the time of writing whether or not modifications might be required for a profitable boot and steady operation.
The Quartz64 Zero is now out there to order on the PINE64 retailer, priced at $14.99.