Squeezing an octa-core Allwinner A733 with dual Cortex-A76 performance cores into a board measuring just 6.5 x 3.2 cm (2.6 x 1.3 inches) is no small feat, but that is exactly what the Orange Pi Zero 3W delivers. The board weighs a mere 14 grams and matches the Raspberry Pi Zero form factor, yet offers LPDDR5 memory in configurations ranging from 1GB all the way to 16GB, a 3 TOPS NPU for on-device inference, and an Imagination BXM-4-64 GPU supporting Vulkan 1.3 and OpenGL ES 3.2. The A733's big.LITTLE CPU arrangement pairs two Cortex-A76 cores at 2.0 GHz with six Cortex-A55 cores at 1.79 GHz, plus a RISC-V E902 real-time coprocessor running at 200 MHz.
Connectivity on a board this small is impressive. A mini HDMI 2.0 port handles 4K60 output, while a USB-C 3.1 OTG port doubles as a DisplayPort 1.4 Alt Mode output, enabling dual independent displays. Two 4-lane MIPI CSI connectors and one 4-lane MIPI DSI connector open up camera and display panel projects. Wireless comes courtesy of a WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 module with an IPEX antenna connector, and the 40-pin GPIO header exposes UART, I2C, SPI, and PWM interfaces. A PCIe Gen3 x1 FPC connector rounds out the expansion options. For storage, a microSD slot is standard, with unpopulated footprints for eMMC flash (up to 64GB) or UFS 3.0 modules (up to 128GB) for those who need faster I/O.
The Zero 3W follows a similar path to the Radxa Cubie A7Z, which also used the Allwinner A733 in a Pi Zero layout. Orange Pi's version upgrades the memory from LPDDR4 to LPDDR5 at 4,800 MT/s, swaps the micro HDMI port for a slightly more robust mini HDMI, and adds the second MIPI CSI connector, the MIPI DSI connector, and the eMMC footprint. Software support is planned for Orange Pi OS (Arch-based), Ubuntu, Debian, and Android 15, though OS images are not yet available for download. Notably, mainline Linux kernel support for the Allwinner A733 has not materialized, with no traces of it appearing in recent kernel releases including Linux 7.0, so users should expect vendor kernel images for the foreseeable future. On a more encouraging note for the open-source community, Allwinner released the A733 datasheet, user manual, and Linux SDK publicly without NDA restrictions in mid-2025, giving the linux-sunxi community the documentation needed to pursue upstream work, and early SoC-level patches targeting the A733's clock controller, RTC, and pinctrl subsystems have since been tracked on the linux-sunxi mainlining effort page, though none have been merged into the kernel and these contributions do not yet translate to a working Linux installation on any A733-based device.
Pricing starts at $25 (€23) for the 1GB model and scales to $50 (€46) for 4GB, $80 (€74) for 8GB, and $99.90 (€92) for 12GB. The 16GB configuration is listed but not yet available for purchase.
