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Radxa Orion O6 Mini-ITX Arm Motherboard with Cix P1 12-Core ARMv9 SoC and UEFI

17 points by geerlingguy 2y ago

geerlingguy 2y ago
The jury's out on support—I've been burned by Radxa a few times in the past—but if it has full UEFI support and conforms to SystemReady (officially or not), at least there's a chance generic arm64 ISOs would install on this system. I'm interested to see if the Cix SoC has the same kind of PCI Express bus 'quirks' that plague other Arm chips, even the Ampere Altra. On devices like the Pi 4 (BCM2712) and Rockchip RK3588 boards, the quirks are bad enough it's painful to get many devices working. But this board, with a PCIe Gen 4 x8 (x16 physical) slot... you could actually do useful, 'modern' things with it! (I also still wish this board is what the Snapdragon X Elite Dev Kit would've been... way more useful outside of just being a tech demo that's loud and in a proprietary form factor.)
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treffer 2y ago
The product page lists EDK II. Is the code available anywhere? I can't see it in edk-platforms..... I would love to have a UEFI I can compile....
- adrian_b 2y ago
  They claim that the documentation and the open-source BIOS/kernel will be released some time in Q1 2025. It remains to be seen when that happens, but if they keep their promise it will be indeed the first device with any Arm core better than Cortex-A78 that would have adequate documentation and software support. For all their previous devices Radxa provides their complete schematics and PCB layout, like it was the standard rule many years ago, but now most Western companies have abandoned this good practice. So I expect that this will also be true for Radxa Orion. For now, NVIDIA Orin is the best Arm-based device that has complete documentation and software support. It has been severely overpriced in the past, but now, when the price has dropped to $250 for an 8-GB Orin Nano developer kit, it has become very competitive.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Never heard of Cix CPUs before. But given that rk3588 with quad Cortex A76 boardsare among the best available for SBC - and often run $120+ - this $199 board is enormously relieving to see, feels like a serious option. And so well loaded out! Dual 5Gbe. PCIe 4.0. So sweet!
kcb 2y ago
Pretty close to the hardware ive been hoping to see for years now. A proper high(ish) end board and soc with good connectivity.

17 points by geerlingguy 2y ago

The jury's out on support—I've been burned by Radxa a few times in the past—but if it has full UEFI support and conforms to SystemReady (officially or not), at least there's a chance generic arm64 ISOs would install on this system. I'm interested to see if the Cix SoC has the same kind of PCI Express bus 'quirks' that plague other Arm chips, even the Ampere Altra. On devices like the Pi 4 (BCM2712) and Rockchip RK3588 boards, the quirks are bad enough it's painful to get many devices working. But this board, with a PCIe Gen 4 x8 (x16 physical) slot... you could actually do useful, 'modern' things with it! (I also still wish this board is what the Snapdragon X Elite Dev Kit would've been... way more useful outside of just being a tech demo that's loud and in a proprietary form factor.)

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treffer 2y ago

The product page lists EDK II. Is the code available anywhere? I can't see it in edk-platforms..... I would love to have a UEFI I can compile....

adrian_b 2y ago
They claim that the documentation and the open-source BIOS/kernel will be released some time in Q1 2025. It remains to be seen when that happens, but if they keep their promise it will be indeed the first device with any Arm core better than Cortex-A78 that would have adequate documentation and software support. For all their previous devices Radxa provides their complete schematics and PCB layout, like it was the standard rule many years ago, but now most Western companies have abandoned this good practice. So I expect that this will also be true for Radxa Orion. For now, NVIDIA Orin is the best Arm-based device that has complete documentation and software support. It has been severely overpriced in the past, but now, when the price has dropped to $250 for an 8-GB Orin Nano developer kit, it has become very competitive.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

Never heard of Cix CPUs before. But given that rk3588 with quad Cortex A76 boardsare among the best available for SBC - and often run $120+ - this $199 board is enormously relieving to see, feels like a serious option. And so well loaded out! Dual 5Gbe. PCIe 4.0. So sweet!

kcb 2y ago

Pretty close to the hardware ive been hoping to see for years now. A proper high(ish) end board and soc with good connectivity.