Radxa Orion O6 Mini-ITX Arm Motherboard with Cix P1 12-Core ARMv9 SoC and UEFI
cnx-software.com
cnx-software.com
I'm interested to see if the Cix SoC has the same kind of PCI Express bus 'quirks' that plague other Arm chips, even the Ampere Altra.
On devices like the Pi 4 (BCM2712) and Rockchip RK3588 boards, the quirks are bad enough it's painful to get many devices working.
But this board, with a PCIe Gen 4 x8 (x16 physical) slot... you could actually do useful, 'modern' things with it!
(I also still wish this board is what the Snapdragon X Elite Dev Kit would've been... way more useful outside of just being a tech demo that's loud and in a proprietary form factor.)
And so well loaded out! Dual 5Gbe. PCIe 4.0. So sweet!
I would love to have a UEFI I can compile....
It remains to be seen when that happens, but if they keep their promise it will be indeed the first device with any Arm core better than Cortex-A78 that would have adequate documentation and software support.
For all their previous devices Radxa provides their complete schematics and PCB layout, like it was the standard rule many years ago, but now most Western companies have abandoned this good practice. So I expect that this will also be true for Radxa Orion.
For now, NVIDIA Orin is the best Arm-based device that has complete documentation and software support. It has been severely overpriced in the past, but now, when the price has dropped to $250 for an 8-GB Orin Nano developer kit, it has become very competitive.