CIX has finally released the technical reference manual (TRM) for the P1 (CD8180/CD8160) Arm Cortex-A720/A520 SoC, along with developer guides for the GPU (Arm Immortalis G720 and NVIDIA/AMD discrete graphics cards), the AI accelerator, as well as OS (Android, Linux, and Windows) and firmware (BIOS) installation and development.
A slow (but steady?) progress
There was a lot of excitement when the Radxa Orion O6 mini-ITX motherboard was introduced in December 2024, as we were told the CIX P1 12-core Armv9 processor would offer performance similar to Apple M1 SoC and Qualcomm 8cx Gen3 platform, at an affordable price ($199 and up for the mini-ITX board), and software support would include a Debian image, full UEFI via an open-source EDKII implementation, as well as an SDK along with hardware and software documentation, community forum support, and regular firmware & OS updates. CIX was even called “a native open source ecosystem chip company“.
So expectations were high. When I first tested the Radxa Orion O6 with Debian in March 2025, the performance was much better than other Arm platform I had reviewed like the Raspberyr Pi 5 and RK3588 SBCs, but a bit short of “Apple M1” claims, and most features worked with the provided Debian image, but it still nedded some work with disappointing GPU performance, Displayport not working, and USB ports were not compatible of my NVMe enclosures. High idle power consumption (16-17W) for an Arm platform was also an issue and has not been resolved to date.
The pace of development and documentation release was also slower than expected, so excitement gave place to disappointment and frustration among many users. Still, things were happening: the source code was first released in early March 2025 along with initial Linux upstream work, Arm SystemReady SR certification was obtained at the end of April, and more recently, the Mali GPU got better support.
A look at available documentation for the CIX P1 SoC
But documentation took way longer than expected, and we’ll now find documentation on the CIX developer website, about one year after the Orion O6 was unveiled.
To access the CIX P1 documentation, you’ll need to scroll down to the “Documentation Resources” section with Firmware, OS, AI, Graphics, and Chip Manual downloads. Click on Download does not open the file, but instead you need to register and account with email and phone number… This requires manual approval too… I already had alredy an account from my early review, so I could download the files. [Update: Only the Chip Manual (TRM) section requires registration, but you can download it from Radxa (files removed) as an alternative, so all documentation can be accessed without registering an account with CIX. Thanks to markon for the tip.]
Here’s a summary for each section.
Firmware
The firmware documentation includes two files:
- CIX-P1-Active Cooling TRM-V1.0.pdf (33 pages) – Active Cooling TRM to learn all you need about fan control for the P1
- CIX-P1-BIOS Porting Guide-V1.0.pdf (62 pages) – CIX P1 BIOS Porting Guide with chapters to set up the build environment in X86 Ubuntu, Arm Ubuntu, or Windows, port the BIOS, and a BIOS application guide
OS
The OS zip file contains seven files for Android and Linux software development, and Windows 11 installation on the P1:
- CIX-P1-Android Board Bringup Guide-V1.0.pdf (32 pages)- Android development and the Android boot process
- CIX-P1-Android OS Development Guide-V1.0.pdf (105 pages) – Overview, and chapters about fastboot, Android Debug Bridge, a building guide, recovery mode, OTA with A/B system, AVB, OPTEE secure storage, Keymint, gatekeeper, and more.
- CIX-P1-Linux ACPI Board-Level Bring-up Guide-V1.0.pdf (105 pages) – Exactly the same content “CIX-P1-Android OS Development Guide-V1.0.pdf”… Ooops.. they should probably fix that.
- CIX-P1-Linux DT Board-Level Bring-up Guide-V1.0.pdf (28 pages) – Linux development, the boot process, “adaptation instructions” for the BIO and system, and kernel adaptation (DTS, grub…).
- CIX-P1-Linux DT Development Guide-V1.0.pdf (61 pages) – Pintrctl, GPIO, PWM, Watchdog, and UART/I2C/SPI usage
- CIX-P1-Linux OS Development Guide-V1.0.pdf (54 pages) – Firmware flashing and Debian OS installation, Debian OS application usage, Debian OS development, Openkylin OS Usage, and Deepin OS Usage
- Windows 11 Installation Guide v1.1.pdf (14 pages) – Instructions to create a Windows PE boot disk on a USB drive, install the Windows ISO image on the USB drive, and install Windows 11
“~$ndows 11 Installation Guide v1.1.docx” can be ignored since it’s a corrupted file (likely the same as Windows 11 Installation Guide v1.1.pdf).
AI
We have two files for the built-in NPU and AI software development:
- CIX-P1-NOE SDK and AI ModelHub Development Guide-V1.0.pdf (47 pages) – Introduction, Neural One (NOE) SDK installation/usage, NOE Compiler, CIX AI Model Hub, and NOE quantization
- CIX-P1-NPU Development Guide-V1.0.pdf (42 pages) – Introduction, CIX NPU hardware configuration (DTS), NPU drivers for Linux and Android, NOE SDK, CIX AI Model Hub minimal description (details are in the above document), and debugging methods.
Graphics
The graphic documentation is a single 25-page file (CIX-P1-Linux GPU Development Guide-V1.0.pdf) that explains how to get started with Arm GPU driver development using the proprietary driver, as well as NVIDIA/AMD graphics cards adaptation, and a section on Panfrost/Panthod open-source driver configuration.
Chip Manual (aka TRM)
The technical reference manual for the P1 was the most requested document. It’s comprised of two files:
- CIX-P1-TRM-Part 1-V1.0-Public Developers.pdf (6179 pages) – Covers System overview, CPU, GPU, NPU, VPU, DPU, SMMU, and PCIe.
- CIX-P1-TRM-Part 2-V1.0-Public Developers.pdf (3051 pages) – Covers USB, FCH (GPIO, SPI, I2C, UART, I3C, timer, XSPI, and DMA), DDR, ISP, DP, Audio, MIPI, and Debug
All this will help if the community is interested in improving the software for the CIX P1. It’s unclear whether any of that will help fix the high idle power consumption, which is a non-starter for some people. I suspect I might require SoC-level power management optimizations that would probably have to be handled by CIX themselves, although I can see a few power management sections in the P1 TRM. In the worst case, it might require a new silicon revision.
Thanks to redefineme for the tip.
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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