CIX Category - CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

December 31, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

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 […]

December 13, 2025December 17, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 18 Comments

CIX releases P1 CPU TRM and developer guides for GPU, AI accelerator, OS and firmware/BIOS

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 […]

December 4, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

MetaComputing AI PC with Framework Laptop 13 features CIX P1 12-core Arm processor with up to 45 TOPS

MetaComputing, a Switzerland-based company founded in 2024, has announced the “MetaComputing AI PC with Framework Laptop 13” featuring the same CIX P1 12-core Cortex-A720/A520 SoC with 45 TOPS found in SBCs like the Orion O6 and Orange Pi 6 Plus, or the MINISFORUM MS-R1 mini PC. As far as I know, it’s the first laptop based on CIX P1. It features 16GB or 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD and ships with the Framework Laptop 13 chassis (Pro model). There’s also a “Standard” model with a co-branded Framework and Cooler Master Case. MetaComputing AI PC specifications (preliminary): SoC – CIX P1 (CP8180) 12-core DynamIQ processor 4x Cortex‑A720 big cores @ up to 2.6 GHz 4x Cortex‑A720 medium cores 4x Cortex‑A520 LITTLE cores 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 […]

November 11, 2025November 11, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

$500+ MINISFORUM MS-R1 Arm Linux AI mini PC features CIX CP8180 12-core SoC, up to 64GB LPDDR5x

MINISFORUM MS-R1 is an AI mini PC running Debian 12 Linux that’s powered by a CIX P1 (CP8180) 12-core Arm Cortex-A720/A520 processor with up to 45 TOPS of AI performance. The mini PC supports up to 64GB of soldered-on LPDDR5 memory, M.2 storage, and provides HDMI, USB-C DP, and eDP display interfaces, two 10GbE ports and WiFi 6E, a total of nine USB ports, a PCIe Gen x16 slot for a graphics card, U.2 storage, or networking expansion, a 40-pin internal GPIO header, and more. MINISFORUM MS-R101 specifications: SoC – Cix CP8180 (P1) 12-core DynamIQ processor 4x Cortex‑A720 big cores @ up to 2.6 GHz 4x Cortex‑A720 medium cores 4x Cortex‑A520 LITTLE cores 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, […]

October 15, 2025October 16, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 22 Comments

Orange Pi 6 Plus – CIX P1 SBC offers up to 64GB LPDDR5 memory, 45 TOPS of AI performance

Orange Pi 6 Plus Heatsink fan cooling solution

We wrote about the Orion O6N Nano-ITX SBC yesterday, mentioning that the Orange Pi 6 Plus was in the works. The good news is that the CIX P1 (CD8180/CD8180) single board from Orange Pi is now available on AliExpress for $223.90 with 16GB RAM and $268.89 with 32GB RAM, including a heatsink with fan, and a 100W USB-C port adapter. It’s the smallest CIX P1 board we’ve covered so far, but it still packs of lot of features including up to 64GB LPDDR5, two M.2 Key-M sockets for storage and/or AI accelerators, one M.2 Key-E socket for WiFi and Bluetooth, dual 5GbE networking, five displays interfaces via HDMI, DP, USB-C, and eDP, two 4-lane camera interfaces, and more. Orange Pi 6 Plus specifications: SoC – Cix P1 (Codename: CD8180 or CD8160) 12-core DynamIQ processor 4x Cortex‑A720 big cores @ up to 2.6 GHz 4x Cortex‑A720 medium cores @ up to […]

October 14, 2025October 15, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

Radxa Orion O6N – A smaller, cheaper 12-core Armv9 Nano-ITX SBC based on CIX P1 (CD8160) SoC

Radxa Orion O6N is a Nano-ITX SBC powered by CIX P1 (CD8160 variant) 12-core Cortex-A720/A50 processor with a 30/45 TOPS AI accelerator, up to 64GB LPDDR5, support for UFS and M.2 NVMe storage, and plenty of interfaces. It’s a smaller and cheaper version of the Orion O6 mini-ITX motherboard introduced at the end of last year. It offers most of the same features, but is equipped with a CD8160 SoC instead of a CD8180 with a slightly lower CPU frequency for the Cortex-A720 big cores (2.6 vs 2.8 GHz), more storage options, fewer display interfaces, no dedicated audio port, 2.5GbE networking instead of 5GbE, and a few other differences you can see in the specifications below. Radxa Orion O6N specifications (highlights in bold and strikethrough show differences against Orion O6): SoC – Cix P1 (Codename: CD8160) 12-core DynamIQ processor 4x Cortex‑A720 big cores @ up to 2.6 GHz 4x Cortex‑A720 […]

September 29, 2025November 6, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Linux 6.17 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.17 has just been released on LKML: No huge surprises this past week, so here we are, with kernel 6.17 pushed out and ready to go. Below is the shortlog for just the last week – not the full 6.17 release – as usual. It’s not exciting, which is all good. I think the biggest patch in there is some locking fixes for some bluetooth races that could cause use-after-free situations. Whee – that’s about as exciting as it gets. Other than that, there’ the usual driver fixlets (GPU and networking dominate as usual, but “dominate” is still pretty small), there’s some minor random other driver updates, some filesystem noise, and core kernel and mm. And some selftest updates. This obviously means that the merge window for 6.18 will open tomorrow, and I already have four dozen pull requests pending. Thanks to the proactive people – you know who […]

August 23, 2025August 23, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 16 Comments

TrueNAS is now (unofficially) available for 64-bit Arm platforms with UEFI support

TrueNAS Scale NAS platform was designed to work on x86-64 computers only, but there’s now an unofficial port for 64-bit Arm (Aarch64) targets running a UEFI bootloader, including the Raspberry Pi 4/5 SBCs and other higher-end Arm boards. Previously known as FreeNAS, the community edition, FreeBSD-based TrueNAS Core was phased out in 2022 and replaced with the Linux-based TrueNAS Scale. iXsystems also provides TrueNAS Enterprise, a paid version with more advanced features, but all versions only work on 64-bit x86 machines. TrueNAS forum user Joel0 decided to change that and patched TrueNAS Scale to run on ARM (aarch64). The main requirements are having a 64-bit Arm target, at least 8GB RAM, 16GB boot storage, and a working UEFI bootloader. The image has been tested with a QEMU virtual machine, and it should also work on a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 with UEFI, but it has not been tested. One […]