Year 2025 in Review, CNX Software stats, and looking ahead to 2026

Time for the last post of 2025, as the year is almost over. I’ll look back at key developments and notable products launched in 2025, share some CNX Software website traffic statistics, and look ahead to 2026.

Year 2025 in Review

After 22 product releases in 2024, Raspberry Pi calmed down a little bit in 2025, and the highlights of the year included the Raspberry Pi 500+ mechanical keyboard, the 5-inch variant of the Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2, and a Raspberry Pi 5 1GB RAM. What didn’t quite stop were the accessories from third parties for Raspberry Pi SBC and Raspberry Pi Pico boards.

The most exciting Arm SoC release of 2025 was probably the 12-core CIX P1 Armv9 SoC found in Radxa Orion O6 SBC, MINISFORUM MS-R1 Arm mini PC, and Orange Pi 6 Plus board, but while performance was fine, it was overhyped in 2024, and software progress was slow (albeit much improved by the end of the year), and the high idle power consumption didn’t help either. We also had hopes for new Allwinner SoCs like the A733 found in the Orange Pi 4 Pro and Radxa Cubie A7Z due to open-source commitments, but this also fell short. We had more news about Rockchip RK3688 and RK3668 Armv9 SoCs, but nothing concrete yet, and no updates about the Allwinner A838. I’m almost depressed as I feel not much happened on that front in 2025. 2026 should be a better year.

Equally, there were no new groundbreaking RISC-V processors in 2025, but that does not mean the RISC-V news flow stopped with new boards and motherboards announced throughout the year. My just-published review of the StarFive’s VisionFive 2 Lite SBC showed that a lot of progress was made on the software front, and we may see Linux-capable RISC-V boards seriously compete against Arm boards in the next couple of years.

On the x86 front, it was also a fairly quiet year with companies continuing to release mini PCs, SBCs, and network appliances based on Intel Alder Lake-N processors as well as Amston Lake and Twin Lake derivatives. We’re still waiting for the Wildcat Lake release, hopefully next month. There’s still no low-power, low-cost equivalent from AMD, and instead, we ended up covering their new “Embedded” offerings, such as the AMD EPYC Embedded 9005 and Embedded 2005 families. We reviewed fewer mini PCs this year, with only three from GEEKOM (A6 and MINI IT12 2025 Edition) and Beelink (EQi13 Pro), although we had the chance to test a few extra Intel SBCs as discussed below.

Besides the Raspberry Pi 5 1GB RAM and CIX P1 SBCs mentioned above, companies kept churning out single board computers in 2025. Rockchip SBCs remained at the top of the charts with boards such as Radxa ROCK 4D, Sakura Pi RK3308B, Banana Pi BPI-Forge1, FriendlyELEC NanoPi M5, Luckfox Lyra Pi, and many others. Those were mostly based on entry-level and mid-range SoCs. As noted above, we also had a few Allwinner SBCs introduced this year, and the only notable based on Amlogic was the ODROID-C5 powered by an S905X5 quad-core Cortex-A55 SoC. Other boards include the Radxa Q6A with a Qualcomm QCS6490 SoC, Banana Pi router boards like the BPI-R4 Pro, a range of x86 SBCs such as LattePanda IOTA, and a few Intel x86 AI boards from AAEON we’ve reviewed, such as the low-end UP TWL AI Dev Kit and high-end UP Xtreme ARL AI Dev Kit, among others. As every year, we also covered plenty of industrial SBCs and motherboards based on Intel, NXP, Renesas, STM32, and other processors.

On the microcontroller front, while Espressif ESP32-P4 RISC-V MCU was officially launched last year, we only started to see third-party ESP32-P4 boards this year, and I’m still reading complaints about the availability of the new RISC-V microcontroller in comments. We also had a few announcements about the ESP32-C5 for dual-band WiFi 6. As usual, Renesas, STMicro, GigaDevice, and other vendors all had their share of news microcontrollers from ultra-low-power devices to more capable Cortex-M85/M55 models.

LPWAN products continued to be dominated by LoRa and LoRaWAN solutions, notably with solutions such as Meshtastic and Meshcore for off-grid messaging and GPS coordinate sharing. Matter and Home Assistant/ESPHome got most of the Smart Home news coverage on CNX Software in 2025, continuing the trend of 2024.

CNX Software 2025 traffic stats

We published 1008 articles in 2025, including that one, which compares to 1079 posts in 2024, as expected since we had fewer freelance writers this year, with Debashis helping me find and write various topics. Thai reviewers also got to help with reviews in English and Thai, and Kajornsap published several robotics, 3D printer, and laser engraver reviews, Paisit worked on Smart Home reviews, Arnon worked on SBCs and ESP32 kits, Kumpee published reviews on a range of topics, and Suthinee – our Thai editor – kept on working on various reviews, and translating most of the articles into Thai language. The traffic dropped quite a bit at the beginning of the year due to further Google Search traffic, but recovered nicely after mid-year, partially due to changing social network posting strategy, but also artificial in a way, due to bots, as we’ll see shortly. Google Analytics eventually reported 7.5 million page views for the year, and one million pageviews for December (about 300K from bots).

Let’s check the top countries and cities in 2025 according to Google Analytics.

The United States is in first position as usual, followed by (supposedly) China and India. In terms of Cities, Singapore, Lanzhou (in China), and London are listed in the top three cities. While I would love to think CNX Software has a massive fan base in Singapore and Lanzhou, the truth is there’s massive bot traffic from China and Singapore hitting Google Analytics users since mid-September 2025. They act like humans, and Google hasn’t found a way to automatically block those, although they recommend that people manually implement filters, which I haven’t done yet. I’ve noticed they don’t hit a specific post, but spread traffic across a large number of posts, so the top list above is still likely correct. So the top cities are probably London, Bangalore, and New York (Ashburn is a relatively small city with many datacenters, so I filtered it out), once only human readers are taken into account. Exactly, the same list as last year.

While the data is messed up due to those bots, I still had a look at the browsers and operating systems.

The top three browsers and operating systems haven’t changed since last year: Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, as well as Android, Windows, and iOS.

The share of mobile traffic slightly decreased in 2025, with 52.9% of users (against 60.97% in 2025), while desktop traffic increased to 45.3% from 35.68% last year.

Looking ahead to 2026

I’m not quite sure what to expect from Raspberry Pi in 2026. Maybe a Raspberry Pi 5 Model A will be launched, as I don’t think it’s a good time for the Raspberry Pi 6, especially with the high RAM prices expected to linger for the rest of the year. One possibility would be new Raspberry Pi RP2xxx microcontrollers with wireless and/or AI support.

2026 could get more exciting on the Arm SoC front, with Rokchip finally launching their 10-core/12-core RK3688/RK3668 Armv9 SoCs, which hopefully won’t lead to the same disappointment as the CIX P1 this year. We may also see Allwinner introduce the A838 Cortex-A78/A55 SoC, not quite as exciting, but it would be the most powerful Allwinner processor so far. There should also be some new RISC-V processors like the SpacemiT K3, UltraRISC UR-DP1000, and Zhihe A210.

Low-power mini PCs might become interesting again, once Intel releases the Wildcat Lake as a successor to the Alder Lale-N/Amston Lake/Twin Lake family, which may happen as early as Q1 2026. Although they now dominate the mid-range and high-end market, I don’t expect AMD to enter the low-cost segment anytime soon.

Expressif should demonstrate its first Wi-Fi 6E solutions at CES 2026, and it (no name yet) might be launched later this year, “enabling higher throughput, lower latency, improved coexistence, and high performance for connected devices”. We should see more affordable products and accessories with 10GbE networking, thanks to the RTL8127 (PCIe) and RTL8159 (USB) low-power, low-cost chipsets.

That will be all from me today and in 2025. I’m joined with some of the review samples from the past year to wish everybody a healthy, prosperous, and Happy New Year 2026!

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

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.