Dragon Q6A: 8-core SBC with Qualcomm Dragonwing 6490

3 days ago 1

When you think about single-board computer SoCs, what names come to mind? Broadcom, Rockchip, Allwinner? Definitely not Qualcomm, so I was surprised when Radxa announced the Dragon Q6A, an entry-level SBC powered by the Dragonwing QCS6490 SoC.

The board itself packs full-sized HDMI 2port, WiFi 6, Bluetooth, and a gigabit ethernet along with your standard 40-pin GPIO. NVMe, SD, and eMMC/UFS make up the storage options, and there are even a couple of Type-A USB ports on the back that I’m about to make use of since step one is updating the firmware.

FIRMWARE UPDATE

Updating firmware goes against my not broke don’t fix policy, but you’ll definitely want the latest and greatest for the Q6A.

Fortunately, the hardest part of this operation was tracking down the single Type-A to Type-A USB cable in the studio. Once that was sorted, all I had to do was put the Q6A in EDL mode by holding down the button next to the headphone jack while powering it on and connecting it to my PC using the USB 3 port.

Then I cracked open a terminal and checked the output of lsusb:

Bus 001 Device 006: ID 05c6:9008 Qualcomm, Inc. Gobi Wireless Modem (QDL mode)

Good to go!

Then it was time to download the firmware.

NOTE: Check the Radxa forums for the latest firmware.

wget https://dl.radxa.com/q6a/images/dragon-q6a_flat_build_251013.zip

Extract it.

unzip dragon-q6a_flat_build_250929.zip

Change to the firmware directory.

cd flat_build/spinor/dragon-q6a/

And download a copy of edl-ng, the application used to write the firmware bits.

wget https://github.com/strongtz/edl-ng/releases/download/v1.4.1/edl-ng-linux-x64.zip

Extract the zip archive.

unzip edl-ng-linux-x64.zip

Time to write the firmware bits using edl-ng.

sudo ./edl-ng --memory spinor --loader prog_firehose_ddr.elf rawprogram rawprogram0.xml patch0.xml

This took about two minutes to complete. Mind you, there was an error about a missing fat12test.bin, but that can be ignored.

That’s that. It’s safe to power down the Dragon.

UBUNTU ARM

Radxa’s Ubuntu image is ready to go if you only plan to run it from an SD card, but I want to install and run the system from NVMe. That means mounting the image and hacking around in the GRUB config every time you want to flash it to a different media type.

Yeah, no. I hacked together a little script that automates downloading the image and applies the correct GRUB settings depending on what you select in the menu. It supports booting from SD, NVMe, and USB.

With that sorted, I wrote the image to an NVMe drive, popped it in the Q6A, and applied the electrons.

The initial Ubuntu setup prompted me to set a password and dropped me on the desktop. Nothing exciting going on here, and that’s how I like it. WiFi, Bluetooth, sound, and wired gigabit ethernet all worked out of the box.

I confirmed the databit throughput with iperf3. It showed 943 Mbits/sec send and 941 Mbits/sec receive. Nice.

STRESS AND POWER USAGE

Using a passive cooler, the Q6A averages 2 GHz for the first 20 seconds of a stress-ng run and drops to 1.3 GHz by the 3-minute mark, with temps hovering around 86°C for most of the run.

Max temp on the Dragonwing is 95°C, and it survived by downclocking, but the excess heat has to go somewhere, and it bakes the surrounding components like the UFS module, RAM, and NVMe.

For light, bursty loads this might get you by, but you’re going to want active cooling on this critter for maximum performance and longevity.

Still, 10 watts under load and a 2-watt idle is a bit of alright for an 8-core part, but it’s nothing special.

DISK SPEED

Kdismark is showing 1.6GB sustained read and 1.3GB writes on the little Micron NVMe drive (left) using the peak preset.

The UFS module (right) is doing what it says on the tin, with 1.5 GB sustained reads but only manages 250 MB sustained writes. The write speed isn’t the UFS module’s fault. It’s the 6 GB Dragon Q6A holding things back.

GEEKBENCH

Geekbench 6 shows the Dragonwing 6490 outperforming the Rockchip 3588 in both single and multi-core. Didn’t expect that.

VULKAN & GAMING

Time to fire up vkmark2 and see if the Vulkan bits are accelerated. It’s showing the Turnip 643 spinning the horse at just under 5,000 frames per second.

Time to check the performance with a bit of Vulkan Quake 3. Running the timedemo pegs the 90 FPS frame cap at 1080p, but if I rip that off, things jump up to… well, FPS go brr.

I do want to try a bit of PS1 emulation with DuckStation using the Vulkan renderer. No issues here, Sonic the Hedgehog XA runs like a champ, and the same goes for Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Battle 22.

Moving on to a bit of Dreamcast emulation using Flycast. You know the game, and you know the song. No issues hitting 60 FPS.

But what about Fromsoft’s latest title? Using Box64 to handle the x86-to-ARM conversion, Silksong is humming along around 40 FPS at 1080p using the OpenGL renderer. Usually switching to Vulkan bumps performance, but not so much this time. It might be a bit buggy.

VERDICT

Even in this early state, the Dragon Q6A has all the makings of a fun hobbyist PC. NVMe, UFS, and this Qualcomm SoC can keep up with the Rockchip crowd. The only real hurdle is firmware updates, and if you’re an early adopter, expect to do it more than once.

If you’re looking for something for light desktop work, skip the 6GB version. It’s fine for an application or two, but load up a couple of YouTube tabs and you’ll be hitting swap.

My only real complaint, and it’s more of a personal peeve, is that the Q6A didn’t include an NVMe screw. Boo!

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