6 ms·

Radxa Orion O6 brings Arm to the midrange PC (with caveats)

91 points by goranmoomin 1y ago

wjnc 1y ago
Can anyone explain me the economics of why a novelty hardware supplier would Not invest in drivers / software in parallel? There must be a good reason for this to happen, it even happens at the other end of the scale, but I would think the very basis (just any drivers, not even good ones) are an affordable investment? What use is your product if every review will say “good product, alas Windows and Linux won’t run”? A reason I can imagine that drivers are (I don’t know!) somewhat interchangeable, so invest in drivers for your product and you are stimulating all current and future competitors as well.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > Can anyone explain me the economics of why a novelty hardware supplier would Not invest in drivers / software in parallel? There is no single company from Asia that deals in mass produced consumer goods that's capable of doing decent hardware and decent software at the same time. As soon as you take a peek below the surface, no matter what, it begins to reek. Let's just go through the stuff I personally own or have experience in peeking... Samsung does decent hardware, but their modifications to Android, or their "hacks" for powersaving that keep messing up apps, or their "smart" TVs that are buggy and slow as fuck (not to mention riddled with ads!)... Sony makes excellent cameras hardware-wise but the software/firmware side sucks ass - the fact that they require a dedicated software to be used as a webcam instead of just exposing UVC is already braindead enough, but even more so given that they run on Linux and the Linux kernel already ships with UVC gadgets. Nintendo makes excellent games but even the new Switch 2 ships with a chipset that's years old. Mediatek's leaks for BSPs / Android are frightening in terms of code quality. Unfortunately, the competition just isn't there. Chinese companies are even worse penny-pinchers than Korean or Taiwanese, and Western companies outside of Apple and Raspberry Pi just don't give a shit because they can't compete with Asian price dumpers or because, like many things in the ham radio scene, get cloned in a matter of months.
  - digisocialnet 1y ago
    What about DJI?
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      Let's just say I'm pissed about the Mini 3 Pro's controller. Has an USB-C host and client port but isn't capable of actually using them for anything relevant, and the built-in wifi is rotten. Zero way of extending the drone's functionality by writing one's own apps/scripts - but the cheaper N1 that just uses a phone, there's hacks for it...
    - cgio 1y ago
      For one their app does not work on a recent pixel but does e.g. on an oppo…Id say GP argument is valid.
  - wjnc 1y ago
    Any thoughts into the Why? Culture, finance, …? I get your point. Also thinking about Sony or Nintendo. Billions more to be made if only those firms where more technically-commercial (make accounts and buying stuff for parents Easy).
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      Cutthroat capitalism is definitely part of the reasons, especially when looking at China and the low end of the market. When there are dozens if not hundreds of factories that have the skilled people to put up a hardware design either from scratch or as a clone of something already existing, "time to market" trumps everything - the earlier you can get the product on Alibaba, Temu or the alphabet-soup sellers on Amazon, the better. As soon as the hardware is ready and the software somewhat stable, out the door it goes - there is no responsibility, no accountability along the chain, so why invest in it? For the "big ticket" brand items, honestly I don't know. If anything I wouldn't blame it on culture (partially because I lack enough knowledge of Asian cultures, partially because blaming systemic issue on culture can quickly devolve into outright racism), but on capitalist incentives once again - the common standard seems to be "as low in terms of quality as you can get away with", there is no market force pushing for better products, and no legal/regulatory pressure either.
- ZiiS 1y ago
  To a certain extent if your reviewers can just turn it on they spend their time benchmarking.
  - geerlingguy 1y ago
    Some of us try out every possible interface... but it turns into quite a slog, as usually only about half the advertised features work by the time the board ships to the public. Things like GPIO, display interfaces, NPUs, etc usually require a lot of tweaks if they work at all. The O6 was better in that regard than many boards, but the bar is not very high.
- jrmg 1y ago
  With the dearth of drivers as described, how do the manufacturers even know that all the hardware works? That there are no flaws in how it’s all wired together? How do they test everything?
  - Palomides 1y ago
    the chip manufacturer usually craps out a hacked up android build
    - dijit 1y ago
      ok, but, naively... Android is Linux with a userland- so the drivers must exist in some form.
      - kanwisher 1y ago
        Android has some ability to have binary drivers that aren't easily reusable for normal linux branches
        notpushkin 1y ago
        Yup. There’s libhybris/Halium which wraps Android drivers for glibc-based Linux distros, but I think it’s more of a hack / stopgap solution.
- rjsw 1y ago
  ARM themself have an open rec right now for someone to work on GPU drivers, the one in this SoC isn't supported by panthor.
- arghwhat 1y ago
  From the perspective of drivers Radxa is not the hardware manufacturer. They combine off the shelf hardware according to its documentation to create a product. Sometimes the original suppliers will have drivers, sometimes they just ship documentation and let it be up to the customers to write it, sometimes someone else contributed upstream support. When you get "drivers" from e.g. Lenovo, they didn't write them - they're just sending what they got along. Nothing would work if there weren't drivers in general, the issue is that hardware can be configured in multiple ways and it's not all going to have have proper support or be well tested. In Linux land, this stuff sorts itself out as people get their hands on the hardware, pretty similar to how e.g. laptop support comes to be.
- buyucu 1y ago
  It looks like they are trying to mainline the code to Linux: https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-arm-kernel/cover/20250220084020.628704-1-peter.chen@cixtech.com/ https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-arm-kernel/cover/... My guess is that they wanted the board to be available to devs early to get feedback. I might buy this board in a few months, when it will likely work out of the mainline kernel.
- jauntywundrkind 1y ago
  ARM has such a mess. They don't actually make chips. And they don't make a sizable % of the design that goes into chips. There's all kinds of other IP, from power management to USB controllers, all manners of things they don't do. So then the task falls to the chip makers. Who each are trying to figure out what to do themselves. These folks don't usually want to do that or have the chops. There's usually one or many different folks taking off the shelf open source and porting it to this particular platform. These folks have a strong strong anti-incentive to do the right thing to upstream support: no one's gonna keep buying sdk's from these software vendors if they upstream support. And it is a pain to upstream support, to spend possibly years figuring out the long term way to do something. (Notably some good players who focus on mainlining have emerged: Bootlin, Collabora.) It's all so terrible. Theres some attempts to mature the platform, to make some standards so at least folks can boot something maybe (SystemReady and an array of neighboring acronyms). But man, it's so bad, your question is so searing, so obvious. This whole world systematically seems unable to do the right obvious good thing for itself, has resolutely remained a shitty backwater for 3+ decades versus x86.
  - ChocolateGod 1y ago
    > to make some standards so at least folks can boot something maybe There's still no incentive to do this outside of server hardware (Red Hat doesn't support rebuilds of RHEL). Why bother making a firmware stack that allows anything to boot when you can just modify the Linux kernel to work on your non-standard hardware and work around any bugs, publish an Ubuntu image that you'll only update a few times and then call it a day. Then, maybe, just maybe, support for your SBC will be upstreamed a few years later, but long after it's actually useful. Look how messed up and fragmented Android is still, even Windows Phone had a UEFI stack that in theory could allow all Windows phones of a certain architecture to have a shared image (although I don't believe this was fully achieved). Imagine if Windows or Fedora for x64 had to be repacked for every single motherboard/CPU combination, it'd be insane, yet somehow it's fine for ARM, what a joke it's been allowed to become. I think electronic waste regulation is going to be needed to sort it out.
    - mappu 1y ago
- wmf 1y ago
  Drivers are extremely expensive to develop (like 10x more than the hardware) and mostly interchangeable so every company is trying to free-ride on someone else to develop the drivers.
  - sitkack 1y ago
    That is why the hardware should be more capable/intelligent. Drivers are the problem so drivers can’t be the solution. You can’t turn chicken soup back into a chicken.
zabzonk 1y ago
Is this so they can say they are "Orion Arm", which is where we are in the Milky Way galaxy?
- drob518 1y ago
  Clever
zettabomb 1y ago
I bought one of these, with the full 64GB of RAM. So far it's been a fun machine to play with. In UEFI mode I can install Fedora 42 with essentially zero issues (it tells you that the bootloader didn't install but actually it did and works fine), which is quite smooth for ARM. It will be nice to see the CPU clusters, GPU/NPU drivers, and various PCIe snags worked out, but I really like what it has at this price point (assuming you're not in the US).
- irusensei 1y ago
  Does the CPU includes something like an fTPM? The documentation also suggests there is an unsoldered TPM included.
  - zettabomb 1y ago
    As far as I can tell, no. It's a separate footprint on the PCB, not difficult to add if you've done a bit of soldering. I haven't tried that yet.
- cenamus 1y ago
  I actually had the bootloader error message on my install too (regular intel amd64 CPU), so might be something else
- buyucu 1y ago
  does Vulkan work? It's a must-have for llama.cpp.
  - aseipp 1y ago
    There is a fork of Mesa with some support for the onboard GPU (Immortals G720), but it's not upstream yet and might not be for a while. Some people on the forums have installed various discrete GPUs, which would obviously work (modulo bugs.) There is also an open source driver for the NPU somewhere (Zhouyi NPU) and some documentation, but nothing in an upstream kernel yet. https://zhouyi-npu-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/0_radxa_origin_o6.html https://zhouyi-npu-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/0_radxa...
jasoneckert 1y ago
> Prices for those in the US (like me) just tripled due to import tariffs (ordering the 32 GB model went from $400 to $1500). This was the biggest takeaway for me in this post. In the past, to experiment with a particular piece of new hardware, we had to a) obtain the hardware, and b) obtain or create software for it. With a) fast becoming out-of-reach for most people, this puts a dampener on b).
- microtonal 1y ago
  There are a lot of open source developers outside the US. While development will certainly take a hit, the world is larger than the US. For more niche boards, it may not even change things much - they are often hard to get due to limited supplies and now more boards will just end up in the hands of developers on other continents.
  - _whiteCaps_ 1y ago
    I'm not so sure about that. I think it's also possible that these niche boards won't get built if they aren't able to sell them in the US market.
    - buyucu 1y ago
      China has 1 billion more people than the US. These board would still get built, it's just that you won't be able to read the manuals because they will be in Chinese.
- doawoo 1y ago
  Reading this line made me so mad. I've been a huge fan of lower power ARM CPUs... this literally just halt/hampers progress in this country. I can't believe we have to put up with 4 full years of this crap. I would have purchased this board in a heartbeat otherwise. Ugh.
  - cyanydeez 1y ago
    ....atleast 4 years
buyucu 1y ago
This sounds like a cool board. Does anyone know if the APU works with llama.cpp?
irusensei 1y ago
The whole tariff situation will probably dry out a significant amount from the incentives for such boards and it seems the only good options for a powerful ARM personal computer or home server are basically Macs or Ampere.
- walterbell 1y ago
  Asahi Linux is making slow but steady progress on Macs. Ampere was acquired by Softbank, owner of Arm.
ksec 1y ago
ARM China, and CIX, Cix CD8180 SoC, Armv9.2 Architecture. I was under the impression that ARM China doesn't have the latest license to Armv9 and stops at Armv8. While ARM HQ opened a separate ARM Unit in Shanghai under a different name ARM Something ( Some Chinese Phonetics ). But CIX has had this SOC with Armv9 announced a while ago. So I assume ARM China is now officially back under ARM HQ / Softbank control? By Control I dont mean just swapping a new CEO but the actual power structure of the company.
qwertox 1y ago
Radxa has been notoriously bad at supporting their hardware from the software side. Their hardware is great, but they launch a product and then won't offer a proper distribution for it, hoping that some developers will take care of this for them, for free. This is why I love Raspberry Pi so much: they care about the software just as much as about the hardware, if not even more. And that is great. Because the hardware, once you have it, that's it, it won't change. I don't know about Raspberry OS, but when I installed Raspbian 12 Bookworm on my first-gen Raspi with 500MB RAM, it worked. It's now working as a VPN server. See this, for example: The Zero 3e is a really great board, but this is the software they offer for it https://github.com/radxa-build/radxa-zero3/releases https://github.com/radxa-build/radxa-zero3/releases 3 weeks ago: internal test build Apr 8: internal test build Jan 10, 2024: beta 6: Currently there is an issue preventing the Debian CLI image from booting, and we suggest users to use the Desktop variant instead for now. Ubuntu CLI: This flavor is provided as-is except for critical issues. Users should look at Debian CLI as an alternative. There are now community maintained Armbian variants, but it took a long time for them to appear. There was also a distibution by some other volunteer, but Radxa did nothing.
- zozbot234 1y ago
  AIUI, even the Raspbian is only supported by a somewhat hacky downstream kernel to begin with. It takes time to achieve proper upstream support, and even then the community can only succeed due to how popular the Raspberry Pi hardware is.
- als0 1y ago
  It at least supports SystemReady. Presumably any OS that is SystemReady compatible will just work? https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-systemready https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-systemready
  - geerlingguy 1y ago
    The SystemReady firmware is currently a bit limited. Not only does it still have high idle power consumption, it disables 4/12 cores.
solarkraft 1y ago
> once I installed the Nvidia proprietary driver with sudo ubuntu-drivers install nvidia:570, it was quite stable Didn’t expect this to just be available for ARM. It really is making its way out of „weird niche platform“ territory to „it’s just a PC“! Especially together with the SystemReady firmware.
- wmf 1y ago
  The ARM Nvidia driver is needed for Tegra/Jetson and Grace Hopper so it has been in the works for a long time.
- walterbell 1y ago
  Nvidia spent time trying to acquire Arm, before regulators blocked. Project Digits client on the way.
sunshine-o 1y ago
> If you're just doing AI stuff or GPU compute, this board might actually be a decent option, all things considered. Looking at the benchmark [0] When I first saw the board I thought this might be the RPi of the "AI age" since it is IMHO the most affordable option with 64Gb of RAM. But I am always cautious if we can really make the most of the so called "30 TOPS NPU" - [0] https://github.com/geerlingguy/ollama-benchmark/issues/13 https://github.com/geerlingguy/ollama-benchmark/issues/13
BirAdam 1y ago
I agree with Mr. Geerling here. I very much wish to see an "open" ARM system, and I want it to be competitive with at least the Apple M1. Unfortunately, due to poor driver support, this ain't that. ARM has had a bad fragmentation problem, and I fear that this will be even worse with RISC-V. For those wanting really open systems with decent drivers, it would appear that x86 or the RPi are really the only options.
- ninth_ant 1y ago
  Fragmentation is only one of the problems. The bigger problem is that these devices are still largely toys for hobbyists. This isn’t an insult… I’m one of them, I have a variety of fun little arm and riscv boards. Lack of mainline kernel support and other standards will hamper their widespread adoption. But as the market matures and shows real commercial potential this will start to be financially worthwhile for the vendors to address. So your assessment is correct for today’s market. But with China being hammered by the trade war, it’s all but certain their industry will accelerate their efforts to have fully domestic tech solutions — and the same will be true of Europe and other parts the world as well. All it takes is one of them to embrace standards to get more commercial success, and then the others will copy and chase them.

91 points by goranmoomin 1y ago

wjnc 1y ago

Can anyone explain me the economics of why a novelty hardware supplier would Not invest in drivers / software in parallel? There must be a good reason for this to happen, it even happens at the other end of the scale, but I would think the very basis (just any drivers, not even good ones) are an affordable investment? What use is your product if every review will say “good product, alas Windows and Linux won’t run”? A reason I can imagine that drivers are (I don’t know!) somewhat interchangeable, so invest in drivers for your product and you are stimulating all current and future competitors as well.

mschuster91 1y ago
> Can anyone explain me the economics of why a novelty hardware supplier would Not invest in drivers / software in parallel? There is no single company from Asia that deals in mass produced consumer goods that's capable of doing decent hardware and decent software at the same time. As soon as you take a peek below the surface, no matter what, it begins to reek. Let's just go through the stuff I personally own or have experience in peeking... Samsung does decent hardware, but their modifications to Android, or their "hacks" for powersaving that keep messing up apps, or their "smart" TVs that are buggy and slow as fuck (not to mention riddled with ads!)... Sony makes excellent cameras hardware-wise but the software/firmware side sucks ass - the fact that they require a dedicated software to be used as a webcam instead of just exposing UVC is already braindead enough, but even more so given that they run on Linux and the Linux kernel already ships with UVC gadgets. Nintendo makes excellent games but even the new Switch 2 ships with a chipset that's years old. Mediatek's leaks for BSPs / Android are frightening in terms of code quality. Unfortunately, the competition just isn't there. Chinese companies are even worse penny-pinchers than Korean or Taiwanese, and Western companies outside of Apple and Raspberry Pi just don't give a shit because they can't compete with Asian price dumpers or because, like many things in the ham radio scene, get cloned in a matter of months.
- digisocialnet 1y ago
  What about DJI?
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    Let's just say I'm pissed about the Mini 3 Pro's controller. Has an USB-C host and client port but isn't capable of actually using them for anything relevant, and the built-in wifi is rotten. Zero way of extending the drone's functionality by writing one's own apps/scripts - but the cheaper N1 that just uses a phone, there's hacks for it...
  - cgio 1y ago
    For one their app does not work on a recent pixel but does e.g. on an oppo…Id say GP argument is valid.
- wjnc 1y ago
  Any thoughts into the Why? Culture, finance, …? I get your point. Also thinking about Sony or Nintendo. Billions more to be made if only those firms where more technically-commercial (make accounts and buying stuff for parents Easy).
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    Cutthroat capitalism is definitely part of the reasons, especially when looking at China and the low end of the market. When there are dozens if not hundreds of factories that have the skilled people to put up a hardware design either from scratch or as a clone of something already existing, "time to market" trumps everything - the earlier you can get the product on Alibaba, Temu or the alphabet-soup sellers on Amazon, the better. As soon as the hardware is ready and the software somewhat stable, out the door it goes - there is no responsibility, no accountability along the chain, so why invest in it? For the "big ticket" brand items, honestly I don't know. If anything I wouldn't blame it on culture (partially because I lack enough knowledge of Asian cultures, partially because blaming systemic issue on culture can quickly devolve into outright racism), but on capitalist incentives once again - the common standard seems to be "as low in terms of quality as you can get away with", there is no market force pushing for better products, and no legal/regulatory pressure either.
ZiiS 1y ago
To a certain extent if your reviewers can just turn it on they spend their time benchmarking.
- geerlingguy 1y ago
  Some of us try out every possible interface... but it turns into quite a slog, as usually only about half the advertised features work by the time the board ships to the public. Things like GPIO, display interfaces, NPUs, etc usually require a lot of tweaks if they work at all. The O6 was better in that regard than many boards, but the bar is not very high.
jrmg 1y ago
With the dearth of drivers as described, how do the manufacturers even know that all the hardware works? That there are no flaws in how it’s all wired together? How do they test everything?
- Palomides 1y ago
  the chip manufacturer usually craps out a hacked up android build
  - dijit 1y ago
    ok, but, naively... Android is Linux with a userland- so the drivers must exist in some form.
    - kanwisher 1y ago
      Android has some ability to have binary drivers that aren't easily reusable for normal linux branches
      - notpushkin 1y ago
        Yup. There’s libhybris/Halium which wraps Android drivers for glibc-based Linux distros, but I think it’s more of a hack / stopgap solution.
rjsw 1y ago
ARM themself have an open rec right now for someone to work on GPU drivers, the one in this SoC isn't supported by panthor.
arghwhat 1y ago
From the perspective of drivers Radxa is not the hardware manufacturer. They combine off the shelf hardware according to its documentation to create a product. Sometimes the original suppliers will have drivers, sometimes they just ship documentation and let it be up to the customers to write it, sometimes someone else contributed upstream support. When you get "drivers" from e.g. Lenovo, they didn't write them - they're just sending what they got along. Nothing would work if there weren't drivers in general, the issue is that hardware can be configured in multiple ways and it's not all going to have have proper support or be well tested. In Linux land, this stuff sorts itself out as people get their hands on the hardware, pretty similar to how e.g. laptop support comes to be.
buyucu 1y ago
It looks like they are trying to mainline the code to Linux: https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-arm-kernel/cover/20250220084020.628704-1-peter.chen@cixtech.com/ https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-arm-kernel/cover/... My guess is that they wanted the board to be available to devs early to get feedback. I might buy this board in a few months, when it will likely work out of the mainline kernel.
jauntywundrkind 1y ago
ARM has such a mess. They don't actually make chips. And they don't make a sizable % of the design that goes into chips. There's all kinds of other IP, from power management to USB controllers, all manners of things they don't do. So then the task falls to the chip makers. Who each are trying to figure out what to do themselves. These folks don't usually want to do that or have the chops. There's usually one or many different folks taking off the shelf open source and porting it to this particular platform. These folks have a strong strong anti-incentive to do the right thing to upstream support: no one's gonna keep buying sdk's from these software vendors if they upstream support. And it is a pain to upstream support, to spend possibly years figuring out the long term way to do something. (Notably some good players who focus on mainlining have emerged: Bootlin, Collabora.) It's all so terrible. Theres some attempts to mature the platform, to make some standards so at least folks can boot something maybe (SystemReady and an array of neighboring acronyms). But man, it's so bad, your question is so searing, so obvious. This whole world systematically seems unable to do the right obvious good thing for itself, has resolutely remained a shitty backwater for 3+ decades versus x86.
- ChocolateGod 1y ago
  > to make some standards so at least folks can boot something maybe There's still no incentive to do this outside of server hardware (Red Hat doesn't support rebuilds of RHEL). Why bother making a firmware stack that allows anything to boot when you can just modify the Linux kernel to work on your non-standard hardware and work around any bugs, publish an Ubuntu image that you'll only update a few times and then call it a day. Then, maybe, just maybe, support for your SBC will be upstreamed a few years later, but long after it's actually useful. Look how messed up and fragmented Android is still, even Windows Phone had a UEFI stack that in theory could allow all Windows phones of a certain architecture to have a shared image (although I don't believe this was fully achieved). Imagine if Windows or Fedora for x64 had to be repacked for every single motherboard/CPU combination, it'd be insane, yet somehow it's fine for ARM, what a joke it's been allowed to become. I think electronic waste regulation is going to be needed to sort it out.
  - mappu 1y ago
wmf 1y ago
Drivers are extremely expensive to develop (like 10x more than the hardware) and mostly interchangeable so every company is trying to free-ride on someone else to develop the drivers.
- sitkack 1y ago
  That is why the hardware should be more capable/intelligent. Drivers are the problem so drivers can’t be the solution. You can’t turn chicken soup back into a chicken.

zabzonk 1y ago

Is this so they can say they are "Orion Arm", which is where we are in the Milky Way galaxy?

drob518 1y ago
Clever

zettabomb 1y ago

I bought one of these, with the full 64GB of RAM. So far it's been a fun machine to play with. In UEFI mode I can install Fedora 42 with essentially zero issues (it tells you that the bootloader didn't install but actually it did and works fine), which is quite smooth for ARM. It will be nice to see the CPU clusters, GPU/NPU drivers, and various PCIe snags worked out, but I really like what it has at this price point (assuming you're not in the US).

irusensei 1y ago
Does the CPU includes something like an fTPM? The documentation also suggests there is an unsoldered TPM included.
- zettabomb 1y ago
  As far as I can tell, no. It's a separate footprint on the PCB, not difficult to add if you've done a bit of soldering. I haven't tried that yet.
cenamus 1y ago
I actually had the bootloader error message on my install too (regular intel amd64 CPU), so might be something else
buyucu 1y ago
does Vulkan work? It's a must-have for llama.cpp.
- aseipp 1y ago
  There is a fork of Mesa with some support for the onboard GPU (Immortals G720), but it's not upstream yet and might not be for a while. Some people on the forums have installed various discrete GPUs, which would obviously work (modulo bugs.) There is also an open source driver for the NPU somewhere (Zhouyi NPU) and some documentation, but nothing in an upstream kernel yet. https://zhouyi-npu-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/0_radxa_origin_o6.html https://zhouyi-npu-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/0_radxa...

jasoneckert 1y ago

> Prices for those in the US (like me) just tripled due to import tariffs (ordering the 32 GB model went from $400 to $1500). This was the biggest takeaway for me in this post. In the past, to experiment with a particular piece of new hardware, we had to a) obtain the hardware, and b) obtain or create software for it. With a) fast becoming out-of-reach for most people, this puts a dampener on b).

microtonal 1y ago
There are a lot of open source developers outside the US. While development will certainly take a hit, the world is larger than the US. For more niche boards, it may not even change things much - they are often hard to get due to limited supplies and now more boards will just end up in the hands of developers on other continents.
- _whiteCaps_ 1y ago
  I'm not so sure about that. I think it's also possible that these niche boards won't get built if they aren't able to sell them in the US market.
  - buyucu 1y ago
    China has 1 billion more people than the US. These board would still get built, it's just that you won't be able to read the manuals because they will be in Chinese.
doawoo 1y ago
Reading this line made me so mad. I've been a huge fan of lower power ARM CPUs... this literally just halt/hampers progress in this country. I can't believe we have to put up with 4 full years of this crap. I would have purchased this board in a heartbeat otherwise. Ugh.
- cyanydeez 1y ago
  ....atleast 4 years

buyucu 1y ago

This sounds like a cool board. Does anyone know if the APU works with llama.cpp?

irusensei 1y ago

The whole tariff situation will probably dry out a significant amount from the incentives for such boards and it seems the only good options for a powerful ARM personal computer or home server are basically Macs or Ampere.

walterbell 1y ago
Asahi Linux is making slow but steady progress on Macs. Ampere was acquired by Softbank, owner of Arm.

ksec 1y ago

ARM China, and CIX, Cix CD8180 SoC, Armv9.2 Architecture. I was under the impression that ARM China doesn't have the latest license to Armv9 and stops at Armv8. While ARM HQ opened a separate ARM Unit in Shanghai under a different name ARM Something ( Some Chinese Phonetics ). But CIX has had this SOC with Armv9 announced a while ago. So I assume ARM China is now officially back under ARM HQ / Softbank control? By Control I dont mean just swapping a new CEO but the actual power structure of the company.

qwertox 1y ago

Radxa has been notoriously bad at supporting their hardware from the software side. Their hardware is great, but they launch a product and then won't offer a proper distribution for it, hoping that some developers will take care of this for them, for free. This is why I love Raspberry Pi so much: they care about the software just as much as about the hardware, if not even more. And that is great. Because the hardware, once you have it, that's it, it won't change. I don't know about Raspberry OS, but when I installed Raspbian 12 Bookworm on my first-gen Raspi with 500MB RAM, it worked. It's now working as a VPN server. See this, for example: The Zero 3e is a really great board, but this is the software they offer for it https://github.com/radxa-build/radxa-zero3/releases https://github.com/radxa-build/radxa-zero3/releases 3 weeks ago: internal test build Apr 8: internal test build Jan 10, 2024: beta 6: Currently there is an issue preventing the Debian CLI image from booting, and we suggest users to use the Desktop variant instead for now. Ubuntu CLI: This flavor is provided as-is except for critical issues. Users should look at Debian CLI as an alternative. There are now community maintained Armbian variants, but it took a long time for them to appear. There was also a distibution by some other volunteer, but Radxa did nothing.

zozbot234 1y ago
AIUI, even the Raspbian is only supported by a somewhat hacky downstream kernel to begin with. It takes time to achieve proper upstream support, and even then the community can only succeed due to how popular the Raspberry Pi hardware is.
als0 1y ago
It at least supports SystemReady. Presumably any OS that is SystemReady compatible will just work? https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-systemready https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-systemready
- geerlingguy 1y ago
  The SystemReady firmware is currently a bit limited. Not only does it still have high idle power consumption, it disables 4/12 cores.

solarkraft 1y ago

> once I installed the Nvidia proprietary driver with sudo ubuntu-drivers install nvidia:570, it was quite stable Didn’t expect this to just be available for ARM. It really is making its way out of „weird niche platform“ territory to „it’s just a PC“! Especially together with the SystemReady firmware.

wmf 1y ago
The ARM Nvidia driver is needed for Tegra/Jetson and Grace Hopper so it has been in the works for a long time.
walterbell 1y ago
Nvidia spent time trying to acquire Arm, before regulators blocked. Project Digits client on the way.

sunshine-o 1y ago

> If you're just doing AI stuff or GPU compute, this board might actually be a decent option, all things considered. Looking at the benchmark [0] When I first saw the board I thought this might be the RPi of the "AI age" since it is IMHO the most affordable option with 64Gb of RAM. But I am always cautious if we can really make the most of the so called "30 TOPS NPU" - [0] https://github.com/geerlingguy/ollama-benchmark/issues/13 https://github.com/geerlingguy/ollama-benchmark/issues/13

BirAdam 1y ago

I agree with Mr. Geerling here. I very much wish to see an "open" ARM system, and I want it to be competitive with at least the Apple M1. Unfortunately, due to poor driver support, this ain't that. ARM has had a bad fragmentation problem, and I fear that this will be even worse with RISC-V. For those wanting really open systems with decent drivers, it would appear that x86 or the RPi are really the only options.

ninth_ant 1y ago
Fragmentation is only one of the problems. The bigger problem is that these devices are still largely toys for hobbyists. This isn’t an insult… I’m one of them, I have a variety of fun little arm and riscv boards. Lack of mainline kernel support and other standards will hamper their widespread adoption. But as the market matures and shows real commercial potential this will start to be financially worthwhile for the vendors to address. So your assessment is correct for today’s market. But with China being hammered by the trade war, it’s all but certain their industry will accelerate their efforts to have fully domestic tech solutions — and the same will be true of Europe and other parts the world as well. All it takes is one of them to embrace standards to get more commercial success, and then the others will copy and chase them.