Radxa Orion O6 is an Arm mini-ITX motherboard with performance similar to Apple M1 and Qualcomm 8cs Gen3 platform thanks to the Cix P1 12-core Armv9 processor with four Cortex-A720 cores clocked at 2.8 GHz, four Cortex-A720 cores at 2.4GHz, and four low-power Cortex-A520 cores clocked at 1.8 GHz.
The Cix P1 SoC also features an Arm Immortalis-G720 GPU for graphics and AI computing, a 30 TOPS AI accelerator for a combined 45 TOPS of AI inference performance, an 8Kp60 video decoder, and an 8Kp30 video encoder. The Orion O6 SBC ships with up to 64GB LPDDR5, features a 4Kp60 HDMI 2.0 port, a 4Kp120 DP 1.4 connector, two 5Gbps Ethernet ports, M.2 socket for storage and wireless, a PCIe x16 slot, and more.
Radxa Orion O6 specifications:
- SoC – Cix P1 (Codename: CD8180, not the CP8180 variant for AI PCs)
- 12-core DynamIQ processor
- 4x CortexA720 big cores @ up to 2.8 GHz
- 4x CortexA720 medium cores @ up to 2.4 GHz
- 4x CortexA520 LITTLE cores @ up to 1.8 GHz
- Cache – 12MB shared L3 cache
- GPU – Arm Immortalis G720 MC10 with hardware ray-tracing support, graphics APIs: Vulkan 1.3, OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 3.0
- VPU
- Video Decoder – Up to 8Kp60 AV1, H.265, H.264, VP9, VP8, H.263, MPEG4, MPEG2
- Video Encoder – Up to 8Kp30 H.265, H.264, VP9, VP8
- AI accelerator – Up to 30 TOPS Neural Processing Unit (NPU) with support for INT4/INT8/INT16, FP16/BF16, and TF32
- Manufacturing Process – TSMC 6nm
- 12-core DynamIQ processor
- System Memory – 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB 128-bit LPDDR5 @ 5500 MT/S (100GB/s bandwidth)
- Storage – M.2 MKey (PCIe Gen4 x4) socket for NVMe SSD
- Display Outputs
- HDMI 2.0 port up to 4Kp60 (HDMI CEC not supported)
- DisplayPort 1.4 up to 4Kp120; MST (MultiStream Transport) support; dualstream capability
- USBC with DisplayPort Alt Mode
- eDP connector with built-in touchscreen support up to 4Kp60
- Support for up to 4x displays
- Audio
- 3.5mm combo audio jack with 32Ω headphone drive capability, integrated microphone input
- Audio Header for HD Audio front panel connector; standard PC case audio support
- Camera I/F – 2x MIPI CSI connectors configurable as 4lane or 2lane MIPI CSI each
- Networking
- 2x Multigigabit 5Gbps Ethernet RJ45 ports supporting 10/100/1000/2500/5000 Mbps speeds
- Optional WiFi 7/6E + Bluetooth module via M.2 EKey socket (PCIe Gen4 x2 + USB)
- USB
- USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) Type-C port with Power Delivery
- USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) Type-C port with DP Alt Mode (4Kp60) and Power Delivery
- 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) Type-A ports
- 2x USB 2.0 Type-A ports
- USB header with 2x USB 2.0 interfaces
- Expansion
- M.2 Key-M (PCIe Gen4 x4) socket for NVMe SSD
- M.2 Key-E (PCIe Gen4 x2+ USB) for wireless module
- PCIe x16 slot carrying PCIe Gen4 x8 signals for graphics cards and other PCIe devices
- 6x UART via headers
- 40-pin color-coded GPIO header with 3x UART, 2x I2C, 2x I2S, 2x PWM, 1x SPI, 10x GPIO
- Debugging – Serial console header; system monitoring sensors
- Misc
- 4pin CPU fan header with smart PWM control
- Fan speed monitoring via TACH
- 75x75mm heatsink mounting holes
- System control for Power and Reset buttons, status LED indicators
- RealTime Clock with backup battery holder (CR1220)
- Power Supply
- 24pin ATX power connector
- 20V via USB-C port (65W at least)
- Only one power source can be used
- Dimensions – 170 x 170mm (Mini-ITX form factor)
- Longevity – Availability guaranteed until at least September 2029.
On the software front, we are told the board supports Debian Linux distributions and full UEFI via EDKII. BSP and SDK are available with hardware and software documentation, community forum support, regular firmware & OS updates, and an opensource BIOS / EDKII and Linux kernel. None of that is available online right now as the Orion O6 was just unveiled in China. Binary releases will start on January 15, 2025, and the source code will be released later in Q1 2025. Some document also shows support for Fedora, and soon Ubuntu, Android, Deepin, Windows, and OpenKylin.
(Geekbench?) Benchmarks results released by the company show the Orion O6 matches the single-core performance of the Qualcomm 8CX Gen3 and getting close to the mult-cire score of a machine with an 8-core Apple M1 processor clocked at 3196 MHz.
Besides the mini-ITX motherboard, Radxa also plans to offer an AI PC Kit with enclosure in February/March 2025, and after that, a CIX P1 COM Express module with LPDDR5 and 16-lane PCIe Gen4 interface.
The Orion O6 mini-ITX motherboard is available for pre-order in four variants:
- 8GB RAM for $199
- 16GB RAM for $239
- 32GB RAM for $299
- 64GB RAM for $449
That’s certainly quite cheaper than Apple M1 or Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 alternatives. The AI PC Kit (enclosure) sells for $39. You can pre-order the Radxa Orion O6 mini-ITX motherboard and kit on Arace and soon on AliExpress (note: if the Aliexpress link does not show it’s your ad blocker). Additional information may be available on the product page.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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We are so glad to announce the Orion O6 at the CIX Ecosystem Event today. CIX is what I called “a native open source ecosystem chip company”. This is a great leap for the ARM ecosystem. With native UEFI + ACPI(coming Q1 2025, currently UEFI+DT), we finally waited for this day, an universal OS for ARM board.
Is a TRM available based on experience the devils in the details?
While UEFI/ACPI are mentioned, are there plans to try to make the system BSA conformant? Is the plan to eventually be able to run (mostly) unmodified Linux distributions on this board much like what can be done on an Ampere system?
Specwise feels nice. Cortex-A720 has MTE, MPAM, SVE, SVE2 and many other cpu features I would like to play with.
But boardwise? No traces of SoC in mainline kernel nor in EDK2-platforms. “@cixtech.com” is present in THREE kernel commits.
This is Arm. Mainline support is not granted.
I wanted Arm desktop 10 years ago. Gave up on getting such a few years ago. And then board appears without trace of support.
How many months/years it will take to get it fully supported in mainline?
Probably 2 years, but let’s hope sooner 🙂
Upstreaming of CIX kernel will starts at Q2 of 2025, currently vendor kernel is 6.1 with DT and 6.6 with ACPI.
I assume that using the AI PC enclosure, power is supplied via one of the USB-C sockets.
Do you supply a USB power supply with the enclosure or do we need to provide one? How many watts are required?
Yes, when using the enclosure, you need to power the board from either USB C port, the PD negotiation voltage is 20V, a 65W power supply is recommended.
More questions:
As for (2), the casing, any mini ITX case should work…
Just remember that the case includes shipping and perhaps some very unfavourable import costs.
Besides it looks to me like AllNetChina mentions shipping and taxes, but as far as I can see only shipping is inluded.
What is the support level for AMD GPUs via the PCI-E connection to be expected? Plug and play or needs recompilation of the kernel or any other actions?
> (Geekbench?) Benchmarks results released by the company
Given the stupidly low multi-core scores it must be Geekbench 6. Here is M1 vs. an older CIX sky1 EVB board (back then the ‘big’ cores being limited to 2.5 GHz): https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/9490370?baseline=8545345
Yeah, I was looking at the specs and a 2.8GHz Cortex-A720 vs an M1? That’s not a competition, that’s beating.
And I’m so tired of the idea that “it can make it up with multitasking”. To start with, no, you can’t. And, more importantly, very few tasks parallelize that well and those that do will run into a limit on these types of SoC before they hit those limits. Real use performance is limited by one, two, and sometimes as much as four core performance. Anything more than that is rarely useful to normal workloads.
2.8 GHz Cortex-A720 doesn’t sound slow to me, and it’s a fraction of the cost of Apple Silicon products, especially comparing like amounts of RAM.
It doesn’t matter much if the performance core is 20-50% slower than Apple. What matters is if the user has control of the system and it can run unmodified Linux. The SoC itself looks like an RK3588 killer and people will pay more if it actually works.
So we suspect the CIX cores to yield better performance with higher frequency?
The single core performance compared to Apple M1 seems like a gap while multi seems close enough.
> So we suspect the CIX cores to yield better performance with higher frequency?
Well, back then the A720 were clocked with 2.5GHz but there’s another older entry where they were clocked at 2.2 GHz.
Obviously there’s more than just cpufreq… for example improved DRAM initialization and most probably also work on the software side of things (as such it will be really interesting to compare performance with Cix kernel and stock Ubuntu arm64 for example)
Vulkan drivers?
It fits a niche for a home AI where Rk3588 struggles and alternatives carry a bigger premium. Waiting for some llm benchmarks and further details on the NPU on what it can support. The MC10 G720 for AI also provides considerable tops and the pcie4 x8 allows for GPU add-ons. I do wonder sometimes due to the serial nature of llms vendors should just invest in a NPU or GPU than both, but my focus has been a local AI for some time. Also soldered on ram than upgradeable dimms makes spec to cost much more of a head scratcher.… Read more »
The NPU looks nice, but seems like just installing an OS and having pytorch and friends “just work” is rare. It’s definitely problematic on the RK3588 (which I have two of). In a similar space is the new Orin Nano Super. It does “just work”, can run YoloV3 out of the box, and costs $250. CPU isn’t nearly as nice, but if NPU is the goal it’s got about twice the TOPs.
I suspect the 30TOPS NPU may not help much with LLMs as it seems to be targeted towards CNNs. Radax Orion docs state max performance Qwen 2 -1.5B is 30 token/s. In comparison Jetson Orin 8GB can run the larger Qwen 2 7B model at 21.75 tokens/s.
I wish this came with ddr5 modules instead of embedded ram
This looks like a fun board for experiments—also, it’s the board I have been asking Qualcomm to make for a while (or Apple, but they would never…).
I still wish we could get basically this, but with an M-series-class chip (like M2/M3/M4, this one’s slowly creeping towards M1). I would love to see power consumption too. Qualcomm’s shown you can hit nice performance numbers, but that doesn’t mean it’s efficient!
I pre-ordered one along with the case. Want to see if it’ll have all the fun PCIe quirks of the last few generations of Arm SoCs from… everyone.
$75 shipping to the US, ouch!
Hmm 128-bit DRAM, 128Gbps PCIe, powerful cores… I’ve been checking daily for that news yet managed to miss it by a few hours until a coworker sent me a link “that’s a board for you” 🙂 The specs and connectivity looks well balanced, comparable to the ROCK5-ITX, with a bit of everything and great extensions. It’s nice to see that PCIe and M.2 are becoming recurrent on Arm boards, that’s what turns a single-purpose device into a generic one that you buy then wonder what you’ll do with it! BTW, DDR5-5500*128 bits is 88 GB/s, not 100. Anyway that’s more… Read more »
If it’s indeed the same as this one: https://www.eet-china.com/news/202407318414.html then the 100 GB/s comes from the fact that it’s announced at DDR5-6400, which makes sense. Also the CPU announced there was given for 3.2 GHz, so there might even be some margin for playing with DVFS later.
On the surface, it looks like quite the value proposition.
But we do need to see some actual results before getting hopes too high.
Assuming that is can come even close to the performance of the M1 and Qualcomm offerings, at the price for something like the 16Gb model, it would seem to point to a large leap in power for new SOC’s that will be more appealing and affordable to the average basic tinkerer.
Intel and AMD must be nervously looking over their shoulders.
I’ll get a sample soon. I plan on using the same case I used for the ROCK 5 ITX motherboard review.
I’ll have to think about accessories for testing 5GbE (not sure 10GbE hardware like the iKOOLCORE R2 Max works) and the PCIe x16 slot.
Some recent 10G switches and NICs support 5G. For example the Marvell AQC107 or 113 support 1/2.5/5/10. It’s generally much less true for server-grade NICs, many of which don’t even support 2.5G.
> not sure 10GbE hardware like the iKOOLCORE R2 Max works
According to your own review the R2 Max relies on AQC113C as such it will support 5GbE.
With 10GBASE-T equipment you need to look in the specs for 802.3bz (NBase-T which also supports then 5/2.5/1GbE and also 100/10 Mbps) and avoid the older standards which are limited to 1GbE or 10GbE.
Jean-Luc, could you check the power consumption of the board when idle from the wall during the tests? I think that many people thinking about building a home server based on this board would be interested. Thanks in advance
Yes indeed! That would be very helpful!
As for 5GbE capable switches: the link here is still valid but 6 months later 145 instead of 123 such switches are listed 🙂
I thought I would just connect it directly to the iKOOLCORE R2 Max running OpenWrt. Would that be an issue?
That’s totally fine for performance measurements (and/or discovering funny RTL8126 driver issues) but since you publish a review such a link might become handy for your readers who wonder which switches may be 5GbE capable.
Potential issues with such switches in mixed environments (1GbE/2.5GbE) such as flow control / congestion are most probably beyond the scope of this blog 🙂
I recently picked up a MokerLink PoE-2G04210GSMX, it has a 1/2.5/5/10G port at the end that seems to work with all the 5GbE equipment I’ve thrown at it.
And WisdPi is now making an number of 5 GbE gear (transceivers and USB adapters) that seem to work okay (using Realtek, so drivers can be a mess on older distros).
Great on paper and that’s it. Look at all these ARM SBCs! Great on paper but no driver support. Don’t hold your breath…
Let’s wait and see.
On the software front, we are told the board supports Debian Linux distributions and full UEFI via EDKII. BSP and SDK are available with hardware and software documentation, community forum support, regular firmware & OS updates, and an opensource BIOS / EDKII and Linux kernel. None of that is available online right now as the Orion O6 was just unveiled in China. Binary releases will start on January 15, 2025, and the source code will be released later in Q1 2025. Some document also shows support for Fedora, and soon Ubuntu, Android, Deepin, Windows, and OpenKylin. Sounds like there’s good… Read more »
Arm vendors already tought us that when they say “boots Debian” (or any other main distro) they mean “we booted our custom kernel into Debian based rootfs”.
Which may mean anything from “got serial console and crashed as we do did not got pcie or storage yet” up to “wow, desktop of some kind”.
It can indeed be anything in between. One of the advantage of using EDK2 is that you don’t need a randomly broken vendor DTS to boot, and a mainline kernel has more chances to boot with limited support. For example my LX2 boards booted an ubuntu 20 image out of the box and worked completely, which was totally unexpected to me (but it’s an NXP chip, the level of commitment to mainline is not the same as rockchip’s at all). Similarly, the AADK board with Ampere Altra SoC works with mainline. CIX says they want to be opensource. Let’s give… Read more »
You mix EDK2 with ACPI like many people do.
EDK2 with DT is not that rare situation.
And yes, would be nice to have hardware which pass BSA/SBSA/PC-BSA ACS tests (or most of them).
Great, perhaps we’ll have usable software in 2030 for this board
No need to wait for 2030, wait for 2025.
2025 is vendor kernel, vendor firmware.
When mainline kernel? Pure Debian/Fedora instead of remixes?
In 2025, CIX/Orion O6 can archive this with UEFI+ACPI: download a ISO from Debian.org, install it with USB drive, boot into desktop, install drivers or some custom kernel package, get other blocks hardware accelerated.
Can I see (S)BSA ACS test results before I spend 500+€ on unknown hardware?
You show interesting hardware but years of dealing with Arm SBC vendors tell me to ask, ask and ask.
There was too much junk already. With nice descriptions.
ARM just released PC BSA 1.0, CIX is running the test now. I will update to you once we have some real hardware running results.
https://resources.linaro.org/en/resource/kDXNkMiFb5LN9t9zRgMsHu
Thanks
I get you’re aggressive because you are involved. If you look up some facts in this short messages you would read some things: Apparantly CNX gets a sample for testing (Jeff did not acknowledge getting one). This could get you some information before you decide to invest (even when getting a “free” board your time will be an investment). The very late support of the G610 was because eventually 3 parties started it (don’t know who paid what): Collabora, Radxa (delivering some Rock5b’s) and Arm. Very important for then future is if a party like Collabora will be paid to… Read more »
I love how people mix ACPI<>DeviceTree with U-Boot/UEFI. Problem with Linux on Windows on Arm laptops is not because they are using UEFI as bootloader but due to how terrible ACPI support is there (in short: you can run MS Windows with them because drivers know the hardware). So device maintainers went with DeviceTree as it is easier than spending time on fixing closed-binary firmware. Main distributions (like Debian, Fedora) boot AArch64 systems with EFI. It does not matter is hardware running EDK2 or other UEFI firmware or properly configured U-Boot or other solution. Distribution provides Grub as EFI binary… Read more »
I never mentioned anything about “free” board – I am able to pay 500€ for hardware. Just not going to do it blindly so will wait for some reviews, code drops, mainline progress and decide.
I checked on AraceTech, and the discount is totally absorbed in shipping costs. I tried to pre-order two boards, that ended up with 166 or 176 EUR shipping cost respectively via either DHL or Fedex! It’s not just excessive, it’s downright prohibitive! I thought that Radxa partnered with Arace in part to reduce shipping costs to Europe, but here it clearly didn’t work at all, it’s as expensive as ordering directly from HardKernel 🙁 So I’ll wait for the final version to be available on Ali and other places next year instead. Too bad, as I estimated that pre-ordering was… Read more »
Allnetchina has much more reasonable shipping costs. they don’t have all accessories though (heat sink etc). I think we need to wait for the product to reach vendors, it will be easier.
Is this motherboards CPU considered to be faster than the RK3588?
Definitely. Based on various marketing docs from Arm there are reasonable reasons to expect a conservative 40-60% perf increase for the big cores thanks to better IPC combined with higher frequency. The A76 and A720 cores were released 5 years apart, so improvements are definitely expected. Also there’s twice the number of big cores (two clusters at different frequencies), so we could expect 2-3 times the overall performance compared to RK3588. This should be a really nice chip.