Orion O6 ITX Arm V9 board – temper your expectations

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/orion-o6-itx-arm-v9-board-temper-your-expectations

by rbanffy • 1 year ago

47 24 1 year ago

jeffgeerling.com

buyucu2• 1 year ago

I love Radxa. When the time comes to replace my Raspberry Pi, I will likely buy a Radxa board.

ApolIllo• 1 year ago

Why?

buyucu2• 1 year ago

great hardware, good support, nice prices

sunshine-o• 1 year ago

I am also very grateful Radxa is there because if you need something with "a lot" of RAM (64Gb) and cheap (sub $500 price), I believe something like the Orion O6 is the only game in town.

ChocolateGod2• 1 year ago

Cool that it fits in a Mini ITX case and has a standard boot system rather than requiring custom images that won't get updated after two years.

Somewhat a low cost alternative to building a ARM desktop PC to Ammpere. You could build a low cost NAS by putting additional storage over the PCIE slot.

I wonder if it comes with a shroud to go over the ports if put in a case.

geerlingguy3• 1 year ago

It does come with a IO shield / backplate for the ports.

jauntywundrkind• 1 year ago

Here's a Geekbench comparison vs Orange Pi 5+ with rk3588. https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/10014991?baseli...

60% or better lift across the board for single core. Not bad imo.

Catching up with a larger tablet/MID (mobile internet device)/ultra Snapdragon 8cx gen3 is unlikely to come from nowhere. The A720 class core here is good, Neoverse N3 class, but it's still a small chip for arm.

On phones there's been the Cortex-X cores above in the lineup for a long time. It's widely assumed the bigger performance flagship Neoverse V3 services from the Cortex-X lineup. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21270/arm-announces-neoverse-...

What's the power consumption actually looking like?!? 8 wasn't expecting anywhere remotely near phone or desktop cores, apple or Qualcomm chips. Also note that this has considerably more I/o than I think anything made by Qualcomm?

There was zero chance this thing was going to come out of the gate well supported with mainline Linux support & a good uefi/acpi boot chain. Whether Cix can straddle the line & release enough information while not breaking any disclosure limits ARM is setting will as ever be a challenge, assuming Cix even wants to make this a well supported chip some day.

Radxa bears some responsibility as an integrator and board maker but it is such a wider web of work that it takes to make these things happen, and although open source has amazing force multipliers of existing libraries, there's countless force dividers of legal × documentation challenges that detract.

One does not just ship ARM Immortalis GC10 support! These are broader projects, are practically civilization scale or deci-civlizatiok scale efforts, ones open source would gladly be doing & more fervently... If there weren't so so many lawyers & NDA's in the mix, from the top on down.

I'm still very excited here. This looks like it could be an awesome nas. I wonder if it'll support PCIe-bifurcation, which would help NAS'ing it out so much. Jeff? :)

rbanffy2• 1 year ago

Whether Cix can straddle the line

At least there is a kernel and PC-like boot process. I'm cautiously optimistic.

ChocolateGod2• 1 year ago

At least there is a kernel and PC-like boot process. I'm cautiously optimistic.

Me too, I hope it makes building general purpose ARM desktops more feasible.

ARM UEFI/ACPI has been around for quite some time, but nearly all SBCs (outside server space) either don't support it or don't support it properly, and if iirc Linux has been hesitant to support it due to device trees.

megous4• 1 year ago

Here's a Geekbench comparison vs Orange Pi 5+ with rk3588. https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/10014991?baseli... >60% or better lift across the board for single core. Not bad imo.

The numbers look like nonsense. There's no indication of what's being comapred.

From the look of it (see the table), the little core on RK3588 is compared against big core on Cix.

megous4• 1 year ago

Now, looking at supposed inter-generational CPU performance increases between Cortex-A76 up to A720 (as presented on wikipedia), that adds theoretically to ~50% increase at the same clock frequency, so I guess it's plausible.

mrbluecoat• 1 year ago

like many Radxa hardware products, the hardware seems to be in a pretty good place. The software? Not so much ... I've harped on this numerous times: one reason I prefer Raspberry Pi, despite the lower value hardware per dollar spent

I agree. Same with FriendlyElec, Orange Pi, and especially Banana Pi

megous4• 1 year ago

Then you're misinformed. :) Eg. RPi 5 didn't have mainline Linux support for a very long time after launch and it's still very barebones and was not even submitted by RPi foundation or whatever, but by Suse employee.

CursedSilicon• 1 year ago

Pi and mainline kernel support has been a thorn since the OG Pi. Usually they get barebones support and then drip-feed in patches from folks who can be bothered enough to upstream it

The Pi foundation meanwhile just has the `rpi-kernel` fork on github and pretends nothing is wrong with doing it that way

geerlingguy3• 1 year ago

Just a nit—Raspberry Pi often works with vendors and outside contractors (with funding and engineering support) to upstream various parts over time. For example, Igalia is officially partnered with Raspberry Pi to work on Mesa drivers which are in 6.13[1].

I don't think Raspberry Pi has as much priority on pushing everything into 'mainline' ASAP, but less than two years after launch, some things are there.

And unlike many Arm vendors, at least Pi engineers assist with the efforts (e.g. [2]) even _5 years_ post-launch.

Besides that fact, Raspberry Pi has the resources to maintain their patches against current and future LTS branches, meaning you can run their fork at 6.6, 6.12, 6.13, and beyond, which is handy in terms of broad hardware and feature support.

For years many Rockchip SoCs were stuck at ancient 3.x, 4.x, 5.x kernel LTSes, which made a lot of use cases quite difficult.

I am extremely hopeful Cix (and Radxa, to some extent) is pushing to get things in mainline more quickly. But until it starts happening at a rate better than other Arm vendors, I won't give a gold medal to them yet :)

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Igalia-Raspberry-Pi-3D-Opts

[2] https://github.com/lategoodbye/rpi-zero/issues/43

brocklobsta• 1 year ago

100%. Vendor drop BSP releases with no upstream plans are so annoying. Getting proper usage of IPs on the SoC is hard, if not impossible, when not using the "blessed" kernel by the vendor. Even when using what's blessed it can be a pain. depending on what kind of integration you are doing.

preisschild• 1 year ago

Would be cool if that SoC gets released on a "compute module" board design, so it can be used with ComputeBlade. Would love to build a cluster out of a few of them.

https://computeblade.com/

rbanffy2• 1 year ago

Radxa has their own ITX cluster board (modules are RISC-V for now), but the thermals aren't encouraging (the fan in the middle seems rather large compared to a small module).

What you can do is mount a couple boards with standoffs and make a cube of ARM processing power.

With 16 cores, you can add 16 activity LEDs hanging on the GPIO and turn the cube into a small Connection Machine (if you get a nice dark acrylic enclosure).

nyanmisaka2• 1 year ago

As we all know, for a successful development kit, open source support is essential. Cix technology will actively embrace the community and contribute to open source. For the newly released Radxa Orion O6 development kit, Cix technology will promote the open source and upstream support of EDK2 firmware and Linux kernel in the first half of 2025.

https://forum.radxa.com/t/plans-for-adding-support-into-main...

We should see more upstream work starting after CNY. Anyway this board can already boot the vanilla Debian arm64 iso, thanks to the Day 1 EDK2 UEFI/ACPI support provided by Cix.

pabs32• 1 year ago

Is that EDK2 support being upstreamed into Tianocore projects?

nyanmisaka2• 1 year ago

Yes, Cix will do it.

Orion O6 ITX Arm V9 board – temper your expectations

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