Qualcomm Snapdragon X octa-core Arm SoC to power $600+ mainstream AI PCs with Copilot+ support

Qualcomm Snapragon X highlights

Qualcomm has unveiled the Snapdragon X octa-core Arm SoC at CES 2025 designed for mainstream AI PCs with Copilot+, which should start at $600 and up. This follows the announcements of the high-end 4.3GHz Snapdragon X Elite 12-core SoC in 2023, and the Snapdragon X Plus 10-/8-core processors last year, and should make AI PCs affordable to a wider range of consumers. The new Snapdragon X is clocked at up to 3.0 GHz, still features a 45 TOPS Hexagon NPU, supports NVMe storage, up to 64GB LPDDR5,  up to 2560 x 1440 built-in displays, up to three external displays at 4Kp60, and a single camera up to 36MP resolution. Systems based on the new octa-core processor can support WiFi 7, WiFi 6E, and/or 5G LTE connectivity. Qualcomm Snapdragon X (X1-26-100) specifications: CPU – Octa-core 64-bit Armv8 Oryon processor clocked at up to 3.0 GHz (2976 MHz) with 30MB cache GPU […]

FOSDEM 2025 schedule – Embedded, Open Hardware, RISC-V, Edge AI, and more

FOSDEM 2025 Schedule Embedded

FOSDEM 2025 will take place on February 1-2 with over 8000 developers meeting in Brussels to discuss open-source software & hardware projects. The free-to-attend (and participate) “Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting” grows every year, and in 2025 there will be 968 speakers, 930 events, and 74 tracks. Like every year since FOSDEM 2015 which had (only) 551 events, I’ll create a virtual schedule with sessions most relevant to the topics covered on CNX Software from the “Embedded, Mobile and Automotive” and “Open Hardware and CAD/CAM” devrooms, but also other devrooms including “RISC-V”, “FOSS Mobile Devices”, “Low-level AI Engineering and Hacking”, among others. FOSDEM 2025 Day 1 – Saturday 1 10:30 – 11:10 – RISC-V Hardware – Where are we? by Emil Renner Berthing I’ll talk about the current landscape of available RISC-V hardware powerful enough to run Linux and hopefully give a better overview of what to […]

Khadas Mind Maker Kit review – Part 2: Windows 11 Home on an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V AI mini PC

Khadas Mind Maker Kit Review Windows 11

I’ve already gone through the specifications and an unboxing of the “Khadas Mind 2 AI Maker Kit” powered by an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V “Lunar Lake” processor delivering up to 115 TOPS of AI performance and equipped with 32GB LPDDR5X RAM and a 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD in the first part of the review. I’ve now spent time with the mini PC/developer kit which is now simply called “Khadas Mind Maker Kit”, and I will report my experience with the Windows 11 Home 24H2 operating system in the second part of the review testing features, running benchmarks including an AI benchmark, evaluating networking and storage performance, testing the thermal design while under stress, and taking measurements for fan noise and power consumption. It looks like some AI features may finally be usable on Windows, but I’ll test that in a separate post since everything is new and Microsoft Copilot+, […]

Looktech’s AI-powered smart glasses offer a 14-hour battery life, 13MP camera, and linear audio for $209 and up (Crowdfunding)

Looktech AI-powered smart glasses

Looktech AI Glasses are AI-powered smart glasses with a “privacy-focused design” and several lens options. They are similar to Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses but support GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini instead of Meta AI. Like Meta’s smart glasses, the Looktech AI Glasses incorporate headphones, a camera, and an AI model for a hands-free experience and personalized AI assistance. According to Looktech, the smart glasses can track calories, find recipes, set reminders, and perform image searches. The in-built 13MP camera can be used to capture high-res images and videos and the open-ear dual speakers provide “rich, spatialized immersive audio while keeping you aware of your surroundings.” Looktech has given some hardware specifications for the product but the list is a bit sparse. We have covered the much cheaper but underpowered LILYGO T-Glass. Although there are no promises of a physical AI agent, the Looktech glasses are similar to the M5Stack’s Module LLM […]

ESP32-AIVoice-Z01 is an ESP32-S3 AI voice kit with dual microphones, wake word detection, noise reduction and echo cancellation

ESP32 AIVoice Z01 Development Kit

The ESP32-AIVoice-Z01 is an affordable ESP32-S3-powered AI voice kit designed for creating voice-controlled AI applications. It features Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity through the ESP32-S3 SoC, a dual digital microphone array for accurate voice recognition, and an onboard amplifier. The system also implements audio algorithms for noise reduction and echo cancellation. The ESP32-AIVoice-Z01 board supports Espressif’s WakeNet voice wake-up framework and integrates with the AiLinker open-source backend service framework to enable the connection to various large AI model services like OpenAI, ZhiPu QingYan, TongYi QianWen, and DouBao. These features make this device suitable for developing AI-powered toys, IoT devices, mobile devices, and smart home applications. ESP32-AIVoice-Z01 ESP32 AI voice kit specifications Wireless module – ESP32-S3-WROOM-1U SoC – Espressif Systems ESP32-S3 dual-core Xtensa LX7 processor Memory – 8MB PSRAM Storage – 16MB flash Wireless – WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity with external antenna Storage – MicroSD card slot Audio Dual digital microphone array […]

SO-ARM100 is an open-source AI robotic arm kit with LeRobot integration and NVIDIA Jetson support

SO ARM100 AI Arm Kit

Seeed Studio has recently started selling the SO-ARM100 AI Robotic Arm kit, a low-cost AI arm designed for real-world robotics applications. This open-source hardware device features a 6-degree-of-freedom design with high-torque STS3215 bus servos, a 12-bit magnetic encoder for precise angle sensing, and UART for communication. The arm comes with motors, driver boards, power adapters, and other 3D-printed parts like arm segments, base, grippers, and motor mounts. Designed to work with the NVIDIA Jetson edge platform, it is ideal for grasping and placing. All these features make this device suitable for education, research, and AI-driven robotics projects. SO-ARM100 AI robotic arm kit specifications Degrees of Freedom (DOF) – 6 Motor control Total servo – 12x STS3215 bus servos Servo torque Arm kit Standard – 19.5 kg.cm @ 7.4V Arm kit pro – 30 kg.cm @ 12V (Pro) Angle Sensor – 12-bit magnetic encoder USB – USB-C for programming and testing […]

Firefly’s CSB1-N10 series AI cluster servers can deliver up to 1000 TOPS of AI power with Rockchip or NVIDIA Jetson Modules

CSB1 N10 series AI cluster servers

Firefly has recently introduced the CSB1-N10 series AI cluster servers designed for applications such as natural language processing, robotics, and image generation. These 1U rack-mounted servers are ideal for data centers, private servers, and edge deployments. The servers have multiple computing nodes, featuring either energy-efficient processors (Rockchip RK3588, RK3576, or SOPHON BM1688) or high-performance NVIDIA Jetson modules (Orin Nano, Orin NX). With 60 to 1000 TOPS AI power, the CSB1-N10 servers can handle the demands of large AI models, including language models like Gemma-2B and Llama3, as well as visual models like EfficientVIT and Stable Diffusion. CSB1-N10 series specifications All CSB1-N10 AI servers have the same interfaces, and the only differences are the CPU, memory, storage, multimedia, AI capabilities, and related software support. So it’s likely Firefly has made Rockchip system-on-modules compatible with NVIDIA Jetson SO-DIMM form factor, and indeed we previously noted that Firefly designed Core-1688JD4, Core-3576JD4, or Core-3588JD4 […]

Radxa Orion O6 mini-ITX motherboard is powered by Cix P1 12-core Armv9 SoC with a 30 TOPS AI accelerator

Radxa Orion 06 Armv9 mini ITX motherboard

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 Cortex‑A720 big cores @ up […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC