Hardware Overview
I grabbed the 4GB version of the Radxa A5E (RS500-D4E0J0R38S16) – it’s the one with no EMMC and an A527 SOC. You’ll need your own SD card or NVME drive to run it (FYI, NVME boot isn’t supported yet as of now). Also, the board doesn’t come with a heatsink, so if you’re worried about chip temps, be sure to pick one up on your own.
The SOC measures 17x17mm and the memory chip is 14x10mm.
I downloaded the system from linux-sunxi.org/Radxa_Cubie_A5E. The default kernel version is:
1 | Linux localhost 5.15.147 #29 SMP PREEMPT Tue Feb 11 10:46:48 CST 2025 aarch64 GNU/Linux |
As of this writing, the only available system is the one built by linux-sunxi. One thing to note: SSH root login is disabled by default, so you’ll need a monitor to manually enable it.
The SOC is Allwinner’s A527, packing 8x Cortex-A55 cores with these flags:
fp asimd aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 atomics fphp asimdhp cpuid asimdrdm lrcpc dcpop asimddp
It features a dual-cluster setup: 4 cores at 1.8GHz and 4 cores at 1.4GHz, plus an RV MCU (Xuantie E906).
IO & Connectivity
- Ethernet: Two 1Gbps ports (directly from the CPU).
- USB: One USB 3.0 port and one USB 2.0 Type-C port (for power).
- Video/GPIO: HDMI output and general-purpose IO.
Wireless Networking
It seems to only support 20MHz channels on WiFi 6 (up to 300Mbps). The current system doesn’t work with WPA3 networks – only WPA2 with an 80MHz channel is playable (I only tested WiFi6). With IPERF3, download speeds hit around 300Mbps, and uploads around 230Mbps.
Wired Networking Performance
When stress-testing a single NIC in both directions, you get about 1.6Gbps total throughput. I’m guessing that with both NICs, you can achieve roughly 1Gbps switching, though it’s not built for 4Gbps jumbo frames (and don’t even think about small packets).
For a quick Geekbench run, check out the scores here.