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August 17, 2025August 17, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 14 Comments

Testing a 30-meter fiber HDMI cable

When RUIPRO asked me to review an HDMI cable, I almost immediately deleted their email. After all, who wants to review a dumb HDMI cable? But I still took a look and noticed that their cable used optical fiber, and they sold HDMI cables up to 300 meters long on Amazon. My longest HDMI cable is about 1.5 meters long, so I got intrigued and asked for a 100-foot (30-meter) fiber HDMI cable for testing. RUIPRO fiber HDMI cable unboxing When I received the parcel, I got two boxes, so I thought there might be a receiver and a transmitter. But no, they must like me and sent two “8K detachable pure fiber HDMI cables”. The cables are said to be HDMI 2.1b compliant up to 8K resolution, and with support for future 10K and 12K resolutions. Other features listed include Dynamic HDR, eARC, uncompressed 8K60 Hz and 4K120 Hz, […]

August 11, 2025August 11, 2025 by Debashis Das - 16 Comments

Sipeed Maix4-HAT – A Raspberry Pi 5 PCIe AI module with up to 72 TOPS AI power, 4K video output

The Maix4-HAT is a compact AI HAT for the Raspberry Pi 5 built around the MAIX-IV core board, which includes AXERA’s AX650N/C octa-core Cortex-A55 CPU, SoC, delivering up to 72 TOPS (INT4) or 18 TOPS (INT8) with 8K video encode/decode support. It features 8 GB LPDDR4x RAM and 32 GB eMMC storage, as well as interfaces such as PCIe 2.0, HDMI 2.0a (4Kp60), USB 3.0, USB 2.0, multiple camera inputs, SPI LCD, I²C touch, speaker, and fan connectors. Designed for plug-and-play use with Raspberry Pi 5 and other boards, it accelerates Transformer-based models, making it ideal for space-constrained edge AI tasks in smart cameras, industrial inspection, and multimodal AI applications. Sipeed Maix4-HAT Specifications: SoC – AXera AX650N CPU – Octa-core Arm Cortex-A55 @ 1.7 GHz with NEON support NPU – 43.2 TOPS @ INT4, 10.8 TOPS @ INT8 with support for INT4, INT8, INT16, FP16, and FP32 inputs; Equivalent to NVIDIA […]

July 18, 2025July 23, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 65 Comments

Rockchip unveils RK3668 10-core Arm Cortex-A730/Cortex-A530 SoC with 16 TOPS NPU, RK182X LLM/VLM co-processor

The Rockchip Developer Conference 2025 (RKDC!2025) is now taking place in Fuzhou, China, with some interesting announcements such as the Rockchip RK3668 10-core Arm Cortex-A730/A530 processor with a 16 TOPS NPU and the RK182X RISC-V co-processor with support for up to 7B parameters LLM (large Language Model)or VLM (Vision Language Model). Rochchip RK3668 10-core Armv9 SoC Let’s have a look at the Rockchip RK3668 SoC, which looks quite similar to the RK3688 SoC unveiled last year, but with some differences. Preliminary Rockchip RK3668 specifications: CPU – 4x Cortex-A730 + 6x Cortex-A530 Armv9.3 cores delivering around 200K DMIPS; note: neither core has been announced by Arm yet GPU – Arm Magni GPU delivering up to 1-1.5 TFLOPS of performance AI accelerator – 16 TOPS RKNN-P3 NPU VPU – 8K 60 FPS video decoder ISP – AI-enhanced ISP supporting up to 8K @ 30 FPS Memory – LPDDR5/5x/6 up to 100 GB/s […]

July 10, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

GEEKOM Mini IT12 2025 Edition Review – Part 3: Ubuntu 24.04 on an Intel Core i7-1280P mini PC

GEEKOM Mini IT12 2025 Edition review performance ubuntu 24.04

We’ve already checked out GEEKOM Mini IT12 2025 Edition mini PC’s hardware with an unboxing and a teardown, and tested the Intel Core i7-1280P mini PC with Windows 11 Pro in detail in the second part of the review. We’ve now had time to test the Mini IT12 2025 Edition mini PC with Ubuntu 24.04, so we’ll report our experience with Linux in the third part of the review. We’ll specifically go through system information, test key features, benchmark the system and compare it against the earlier Mini IT12 “2023 Edition” powered by an Intel Core i7-12650H processor, because checking out storage and USB performance, WiFi 6 and 2.5GbE network performance, stress testing the mini PC, and finally measuring fan noise and power consumption. Ubuntu 24.04 installation We decided to install Ubuntu 24.04 LTS alongside Windows 11 in a dual-boot configuration, so we resized the Windows 11 partition by about […]

June 30, 2025July 10, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

GEEKOM Mini IT12 2025 Edition mini PC review – Part 2: Windows 11 Pro features testing, benchmarks, power consumption

GEEKOM Mini IT12 205 Edition Mini PC review Intel Core i7-1280P Windows 11 Pro

We have already checked out the hardware of the GEEKOM Mini IT12 2025 Edition mini PC with an unboxing and a teardown in the first part of the review. The new model still relies on a 12th Intel processor, and simply replaced the 10-core Intel Core i7-12650H by a more powerful 14-core Intel Core i7-1280P processor still coupled with 32GB of DDR4 RAM and a 1TB M.2 SSD, although the brands and models of the RAM, storage, and wireless modules have changed. In the second part of the review, we will be testing the GEEKOM Mini IT12 2025 Edition mini PC with the pre-installed Windows 11 Pro in detail, notably testing most features and running benchmarks before comparing it to the (2023 Edition) Mini IT12 mini PC with an Intel Core i7-12650H processor. We’ll also test 2.5GbE and WiFi 6 networking, cooling performance, and finally measure fan noise and power […]

May 27, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Rockchip RK3588 embedded computer features 3x M.2 sockets, 4x RS232, 2x RS485, 2x DI, 2x DO, and more

Forlinx FCU3501 RK3588 fanless industrial PC

Forlinx FCU3501 is a fanless embedded computer powered by the Rockchip RK3588 SoC, or the RK3588J industrial-grade variant, and offered with up to 16GB LPDDR4x, 128GB eMMC flash, and plenty of features. Those include HDMI output and input ports, three M.2 sockets for NVMe SSD, Hailo-8 AI accelerator for a combined 26+6 TOPS of AI performance, and 4G/5G cellular module, two gigabit Ethernet ports, a built-in WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 4.2 module, four RS232 and two RS485 isolated serial interfaces, two digital inputs (DI), two digital outputs (DO), and more. Forlinx FCU3501 specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3588(J) octa-core processor with CPU – 4x Cortex-A76 cores @ up to 2.4GHz (RK3588) / 1.6 GHz (RK3588J), 4x Cortex-A55 core @ 1.8GHz (RK3588) / 1.3 GHz (RK3588J) CPU Arm Mali-G610 MP4 GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0, 3.2, OpenCL 2.2, Vulkan 1.2 VPU Video decoder – 8Kp60 H.265, VP9, AVS2, 8Kp30 […]

April 23, 2025May 7, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Pine64 StarPro64 is a RISC-V SBC with ESWin EIC7700X AI SoC, 32 GB LPDDR5

Pine64 StarPro64 is a single board computer (SBC) powered by an ESWin EIC7700X quad-core 64-bit RISC-V SoC with a 19.95 TOPS AI accelerator and equipped with up to 32GB LPDDR5 RAM. It has a similar design to the Star64 SBC powered by a StarFive JH7110 RISC-V SoC, and features HDMI video output, MIPI DSI and CSI display/camera interfaces, two gigabit Ethernet ports, four USB ports, a 40-pin GPIO header, and a PCIe Gen3 x4 slot. The OS can boot from a microSD card or an eMMC flash module. StarPro64 specifications: SoC – ESWIN EIC7700X CPU 4x SiFive Performance P550 RV64GC RISC-V cores @ up to 1.4GHz or 1.8GHz with Cortex-A75-class performance 32KB(I) + 32KB(D) L1 Cache 256KB L2 Cache 4MB shared L3 Cache Cache supports ECC (supports SECDED) NPU – Up to 19.95 TOPS in INT8, 9.975 TOPS in INT16, and 9.975 FTOPS in FP16 Vision Engine HAE (2D Blit, […]

March 30, 2025March 31, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 20 Comments

Radxa Orion O6 Preview – Part 2: Debian 12 – What works, what doesn’t

I went through an unboxing and Debian 12 installation on the Radxa Orion O6 at the end of January, but decided to work on other reviews since software support still needed to be worked on. Since then, there’s been some work done, but no new image released. After waiting for almost two months, I’ve decided to carry on with the review by testing the Debian 12 image in a way similar to the Rock 5B SBC preview I did with Debian 11 in 2022 to check what works and what doesn’t on the Orion O6 at the time of the review. That will involve testing all ports, including 5GbE networking and the PCIe slot with an (old) NVIDIA graphics card, running some benchmarks, and also trying the Debian 12 image with a self-built Linux 6.13 kernel using ACPI instead of UEFI for the default image. Orion O6 SBC benchmarks on […]