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February 10, 2025February 19, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

GEEKOM A6 Review – Part 2: A sub-$500 mid-range AMD Ryzen 7 6800H mini PC tested with Windows 11 Pro (Sponsored)

In the first part of the review, we’ve already checked out the specs, gone through an unboxing and a teardown of the GEEKOM A6 mini PC powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H CPU with up to 32GB DDR5 and a 1TB SSD, before quickly booting the preinstalled Windows 11 Pro. We’ve now had time to test the GEEKOM A6 in detail, so we’ll report our experience with the Ryzen 7 6800H mini PC with Windows 11 Pro. We’ve tested the features, ran benchmarks, evaluated storage and networking performance, stress-tested the device to see how it performs under load, and measured fan noise and power consumption. We’ll also compare it to the previous GEEKOM A5 and A7 mini PCs. [Update: The sponsored tag was added temporarily, as GEEKOM paid for the review to be pinned at the top of the website for one week] Software Overview and Feature Testing Going […]

February 2, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Khadas Mind 2 AI Maker Kit Review – Part 3: Ubuntu 24.10 and the importance of power limits

Khadas Mind 2 AI Maker Kit Ubuntu 24.10 Review

I’ve already reviewed the Khadas Mind 2 AI Maker Kit with Windows 11 Home, and today, I’ll report my experience with Linux on the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V mini PC using Ubuntu 24.10 operating system. I would usually review systems with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS OS, but considering the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V SoC is so new, I installed Ubuntu 24.10 when I tested whether disabling VT-d (IOMMU) would improve Intel Arc GPU performance (it does to some extent), and it turns out it was a good decision because Ubuntu 24.04 requires lots of fixes and workarounds to work the Khadas Mind 2 AI Maker Kit, at least until Ubuntu 24.04.2 is released later this month with a more recent kernel. Khadas Mind 2 AI Maker Kit – Ubuntu 24.10 system information My Ubuntu 24.10 installed has both Linux 6.11 (default) and Linux 6.13 kernels, but I did most […]

January 29, 2025March 30, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 36 Comments

Radxa Orion O6 Review – Part 1: Unboxing, Debian 12 installation, and first benchmarks

Radxa sent me a sample of the Orion O6 mini-ITX motherboard for review. The system is powered by an CIX P1 (CD8180) 12-core Armv9 processor, equipped with 16GB RAM, and offers features like 5GbE, HDMI and DisplayPort, a PCIe Gen4 x16 slot, and more. It’s one of the most anticipated boards of the first part of 2025 since it’s powerful, offers a good performance/value ratio, and eventually promises to boot any ISO Arm64 image through an open-source BIOS / EDKII bootloader. I’ll start this review with an unboxing, NVMe SSD and WiFi module installation, and a short tutorial showing how to install Debian 12 operating systems before getting some system information and running a few benchmarks. In a few weeks, I’ll publish a more detailed review with features testing and more benchmarks to see what works and what doesn’t at this very early stage. Radxa Orion O6 unboxing I received […]

January 21, 2025January 23, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

PCIe3.0 to Dual M.2 HAT+ for Raspberry Pi 5 features ASMedia ASM2806 PCIe 3.0 switch

We’ve already covered Raspberry Pi HAT+ boards with multiple M.2 sockets with various keyings including the Geekworm X1004 HAT+, Pineboards HatDrive! AI, and HatDrive! Dual with two sockets, and the Geekworm X1011 with four M.2 Key-M sockets. So when I saw Seeed Studio introduced a dual M.2 HAT+ board I initially thought it was uninteresting being a very similar board. However, all aforementioned PCIe to M.2 HAT+ boards are based on either the ASMedia ASM1182e or ASM1184e PCIe Gen2 x1 packet switches with 5GT/s shared bandwidth, and Seeed Studio’s PCIe3.0 to Dual M.2 HAT+ for Raspberry Pi 5 features instead an ASMedia ASM2806 PCIe 3.0 switch supporting up to 8GT/s shared bandwidth through the Raspberry Pi 5’s PCIe Gen3 x1 interface. Seeed Studio PCIe 3.0 to Dual M.2 HAT+ key features and specifications: Supported SBC – Raspberry Pi 5 and potentially other SBCs with a PCIe FFC connector like the […]

January 20, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Disabling VT-d improves Intel Arc GPU Linux performance on Meteor Lake and newer SoCs

Improve Intel Arc GPU performance Linux VT-d disabled

In this post, I’ll check whether disabling VT-d virtualization support may improve the performance of the Intel Arc GPU in recent Meteor Lake or Lunar Lake SoC using a Khadas Mind Maker Kit with an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V CPU with Intel Arc 140V graphics running Ubuntu 24.10. A few days ago, I read a post on Phoronix about Intel publishing tips to improve the performance of Intel GPUs in Linux: Keep the system updated with the latest kernel and Mesa versions. Ensure SoC firmware is up-to-date. These firmware updates currently require installing the Windows graphics driver; firmware updates via fwupd are in progress. Use Wayland where possible, as it supports additional modifiers for better performance. For MTL (Meteor Lake) and newer integrated GPUs, disable VT-d if virtualization is not needed. For discrete GPUs: Enable ReBAR_ Enable ASPM_ I was especially curious about the line about disabling VT-d virtualization […]

January 7, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Qualcomm Snapdragon X octa-core Arm SoC to power $600+ mainstream AI PCs with Copilot+ support

Qualcomm has unveiled the Snapdragon X octa-core Arm SoC at CES 2025 designed for mainstream AI PCs with Copilot+, which should start at $600 and up. This follows the announcements of the high-end 4.3GHz Snapdragon X Elite 12-core SoC in 2023, and the Snapdragon X Plus 10-/8-core processors last year, and should make AI PCs affordable to a wider range of consumers. The new Snapdragon X is clocked at up to 3.0 GHz, still features a 45 TOPS Hexagon NPU, supports NVMe storage, up to 64GB LPDDR5, up to 2560 x 1440 built-in displays, up to three external displays at 4Kp60, and a single camera up to 36MP resolution. Systems based on the new octa-core processor can support WiFi 7, WiFi 6E, and/or 5G LTE connectivity. Qualcomm Snapdragon X (X1-26-100) specifications: CPU – Octa-core 64-bit Armv8 Oryon processor clocked at up to 3.0 GHz (2976 MHz) with 30MB cache GPU […]

January 7, 2025January 6, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

FOSDEM 2025 schedule – Embedded, Open Hardware, RISC-V, Edge AI, and more

FOSDEM 2025 will take place on February 1-2 with over 8000 developers meeting in Brussels to discuss open-source software & hardware projects. The free-to-attend (and participate) “Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting” grows every year, and in 2025 there will be 968 speakers, 930 events, and 74 tracks. Like every year since FOSDEM 2015 which had (only) 551 events, I’ll create a virtual schedule with sessions most relevant to the topics covered on CNX Software from the “Embedded, Mobile and Automotive” and “Open Hardware and CAD/CAM” devrooms, but also other devrooms including “RISC-V”, “FOSS Mobile Devices”, “Low-level AI Engineering and Hacking”, among others. FOSDEM 2025 Day 1 – Saturday 1 10:30 – 11:10 – RISC-V Hardware – Where are we? by Emil Renner Berthing I’ll talk about the current landscape of available RISC-V hardware powerful enough to run Linux and hopefully give a better overview of what to […]

January 5, 2025February 2, 2025 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Khadas Mind Maker Kit review – Part 2: Windows 11 Home on an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V AI mini PC

I’ve already gone through the specifications and an unboxing of the “Khadas Mind 2 AI Maker Kit” powered by an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V “Lunar Lake” processor delivering up to 115 TOPS of AI performance and equipped with 32GB LPDDR5X RAM and a 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD in the first part of the review. I’ve now spent time with the mini PC/developer kit which is now simply called “Khadas Mind Maker Kit”, and I will report my experience with the Windows 11 Home 24H2 operating system in the second part of the review testing features, running benchmarks including an AI benchmark, evaluating networking and storage performance, testing the thermal design while under stress, and taking measurements for fan noise and power consumption. It looks like some AI features may finally be usable on Windows, but I’ll test that in a separate post since everything is new and Microsoft Copilot+, […]