radxa News - CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

July 15, 2026July 15, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Reverse-engineering brings RK3576 NPU support to open-source Rocket driver for mainline Linux

Back in 2024, we noted that the open-source driver for RK3588’s NPU by Tomeu Vizoso delivered decent performance for object detection. Since then, good progress has been made, and it’s now known as the Rocket driver in mainline Linux. However, the Rockchip RK3576 SoC is not supported by the Rocket driver in mainline yet, despite sharing a similar NPU. The good news is that Ga Hing Woo has been working on mainline Linux support for the Rockchip RK3576 NPU using the Rocket driver stack and has tested the updates on the Radxa ROCK 4D running Linux 7.1-rc5. This required some serious reverse-engineering work due to hidden registers not documented in the TRM. Ga Hing Woo (also written as Jiaxing Hu) sent us an email explaining some of the challenges: Single int8 convolution now comes out byte-exact against a CPU reference on the open stack. Getting there meant reverse-engineering the compute […]

June 8, 2026June 8, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

Armbian Imager 2.0 release supports over 300 boards from 64 SBC vendors, custom user profiles

Rock 5B Plus Armbian Operating System Selection

The Armbian community has just released the Armbian Imager 2.0 GUI program to easily flash pre-built Armbian-built Ubuntu or Debian images for over 338 boards from 64 SBC vendors. The new version features a slick user interface rewritten from scratch and implements custom user profiles in the settings with username and password, SSH key, Wi-Fi network credentials and country code, timezone, locale, and shell. That means the board is ready to use after flashing. In some ways it’s similar to the Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0, except it covers a much broader ecosystem of single board computers. To be honest, I had no idea Armbian had an imager so far. The last time I used an Armbian image, I downloaded it directly from their website and used USB Imager or another tool to flash it to a microSD card slot. So it’s a good opportunity to check out the Armbian Imager […]

June 1, 2026June 2, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

Radxa’s 2026 Qualcomm hardware: Dragon Q8B and Q5E SBCs, DragonStation and DragonBay NAS systems

Radxa started its partnership with Qualcomm last with the Dragon Q6A SBC, but it turns out it was just the start, and the company showcased more Qualcomm SBCs and NAS systems at a Radxa + Qualcomm developer day on May 30, 2026. The Radxa Q8B SBC will be based on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 octa-core SoC and the Q5E SBC on a Dragonwing QCS6690 octa-core Kryo SoC. The company also teased DragonStation and DragonBay NAS systems, and a 2026 roadmap features a total of 22 Qualcomm systems made by Radxa. Radxa Dragon Q8B Dragon Q8B specifications: SoC – Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 compute platform Octa-core CPU – 4x 3.0 GHz Kryo Prime cores, 4x 2.4 GHz Kryo Efficiency Cores GPU – Adreno 690 GPU with DirectX 12 (DX12) API support DSP – Qualcomm Hexagon Processor, Qualcomm Sensing Hub AI – Qualcomm Neural Processing Engine SDK support for AI […]

April 28, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 21 Comments

What a difference two years make? Comparing SBC prices in 2024 and 2026

Looking back, 2024 feels like a golden year for single board computers, as the increasing price of RAM (and storage and other components) since late 2025 due to the AI demand has made those much less attractive, price/performance ratio-wise. We’ve already documented Raspberry Pi SBC price hikes, and after several increases, the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB went from $120 to $305, or a 154% change in price. Yesterday, I noticed the Banana Pi BPI-M4 Zero had a new version with 4GB RAM and 32GB eMMC flash, and a reader was quick to point out the $181 price tag to Europe was painful, bearing in mind it also includes VAT and shipping. Looking at the original December 2023 article, the BPI-M4 Zero 2GB/8GB sold for $28.90 plus shipping, and it now shows up at $115 before taxes. That’s a 297% hike, or about four times the price from a little over […]

April 13, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Linux 7.0 Release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 7.0 on LKML: The last week of the release continued the same “lots of small fixes” trend, but it all really does seem pretty benign, so I’ve tagged the final 7.0 and pushed it out. I suspect it’s a lot of AI tool use that will keep finding corner cases for us for a while, so this may be the “new normal” at least for a while. Only time will tell. Anyway, this last week was a little bit of everything: networking (core and drivers), arch fixes, tooling and selftests, and various random fixes all over the place. Let’s keep testing, and obviously tomorrow the merge window for 7.1 opens. I already have four dozen pull requests pending – thank you to all the early people. Linus This follows the Linux 6.19 release about two months ago, which brought us PCIe link encryption and […]

March 23, 2026March 23, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

CIX ClawCore Armv9.2 CPU family targets OpenClaw deployments

OpenClaw was just introduced a few months ago, but we’ve already seen several low-footprint implementations, and some companies even ship mini PCs preloaded with OpenClaw. But today, I was just informed that CIX had gone further, and introduced the ClawCore Armv9.2 CPU family specifically designed/optimized for OpenClaw. The family will be comprised of three main SKUs: ClawCore-P (勁螯芯 “Powerful Claw”) – High-performance model with 12-core CPU @ 3.2GHz, Immortalis-G720 GPU, 45 TOPS AI compute, and support for up to 64GB LPDDR5 RAM. Aimed at high-parallelism, large-capacity scenarios. Shipping starts now in March 2026. ClawCore-A (智螯芯 “AI/Smart Claw”) – Octa-core CPU @ 3.0GHz, 80 TOPS AI compute (expandable to 200 TOPS via PCIe AI card), up to 64GB LPDDR5. It’s designed for 24/7 use, supports full-chain ECC, hardware security (encryption/key management), and enables up to 50% reduction in model token costs via local inference. In practise, 80 to 90% of requests […]

March 21, 2026March 21, 2026 by Debashis Das - 1 Comment

Radxa AICore DX-M1M M.2 2242 low-power AI module delivers 25 TOPS of edge AI performance for just 3W of power

Radxa AICore DX-M1M is a compact, low-power M.2 edge AI acceleration module built around the DeepX DX-M1M neural processing unit (NPU) and delivers up to 25 TOPS (INT8) of AI performance while consuming only 3W of power. Designed for industrial robot arms, autonomous mobile robots (AMR), edge servers, drones, and AIoT devices, the module delivers high-performance AI and ML capabilities without blowing the power budget. It relies on a PCIe Gen3 x2 interface and works with both x86 and Arm systems, including the Raspberry Pi 5 and Radxa ROCK SBCs. AICore DX-M1M specifications: AI Accelerator – DeepX DX-M1M neural processing unit (NPU) with up to 25 TOPS AI System Memory – 1GB LPDDR4X @ 4266 MT/s (on-chip, supports up to 8GB according to DeepX) Storage – 1Gbit QSPI NAND / NOR flash Host Interface – PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 (supports Gen 1/2/3 and x1/x2) via M.2 M + B Key connector […]

February 9, 2026 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Linux 6.19 Release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 6.19 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): No big surprises anywhere last week, so 6.19 is out as expected – just as the US prepares to come to a complete standstill later today watching the latest batch of televised commercials. The betting man would expect them all to be AI-generated, but maybe some enterprising company decides to buck the trend? Doubtful, but there’s always a slight chance. But for anybody outside the US, maybe taking the newest kernel out for a spin instead is an option? I have more than three dozen pull requests for when the merge window opens tomorrow – thank you to all the early maintainers. And as people have mostly figured out, I’m getting to the point where I’m being confused by large numbers (almost running out of fingers and toes again), so the next kernel is going to […]