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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) - 20 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 […]

October 2, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme and X2 Elite processors target high-end Windows PCs

Qualcomm has recently announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme (X2E-96-100) and Snapdragon X2 Elite (X2E-88-100 and X2E-80-100) processors for Windows PCs, which the company claims are the “Fastest and Most Efficient” for laptops. All three 3nm parts are equipped with six Performance cores clocked at up to 3.6 GHz, six or twelve Premium cores clocked at up to 5 GHz (single core) or 4.4 GHz (multi-core), an Adreno X2-85 or X2-90 GPU, an 80 TOPS Hexagon NPU for Copilot+, and an LPDDR5x memory interface for up to 128+ GB memory with up to 228GB/s bandwidth. Other highlights include the Snapdragon X75 5G modem, FastConnect 7800 WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 chipset, 4K video resolution for built-in and external displays, USB4, PCIe Gen5 interfaces, and more. Let’s check the full specifications and differences between the three Snapdragon X2 Elite devices in the table below. Qualcomm claims the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme […]

August 28, 2025August 29, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments

Ugoos AM9 Android 14 TV box features Amlogic S905X5 Armv9 SoC, supports H.266 and AV1 codecs

Ugoos AM9 is an Android 14 TV box powered by an Amlogic S905X5 quad-core (Armv9) Cortex-A510 SoC, which supports features such as H.266 and AV1 hardware video decoding and AI Super Resolution (AI-SR) through the built-in 4 TOPS NPU. We first noted the Amlogic S905X5 SoC in an upcoming SEI Robotics TV box about two years ago. Details were sparse at the time, and in the meantime, Amlogic introduced the similarly named S905X5M, which is still a “regular” Armv8 SoC with four Cortex-A55 cores, and found in products such as ODROID-C5 SBC and Ugoos X5M Pro. However, I had not heard anything about the more powerful S905X5 SoC until I came across the Ugoos AM9 TV box this morning. Ugoos AM9 specifications: SoC – Amlogic S905X5 CPU – Quad-core Cortex-A510 Armv9 processor delivering 40K+ DMIPS GPU – Arm Mali-G310 V5 GPU clocked at 1 GHz for 4K HDR user interfaces […]

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 […]

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 […]