A collaborative effort between Arm China, CIX, and Radxa has produced what is claimed to be the world's first open-source Armv9 motherboard. The new Radxa Orion O6 might be more accurately described as an SBC (single-board computer), with its SoC and the RAM quota chosen at purchase soldered in place.
The Radxa Orion O6 is a pretty significant (Mini-ITX) SBC. As such, it is packed with interfaces, ports, and expansion options (except for RAM) and has a rather powerful SoC (System on Chip). Right now, it works with a few Linux flavors, but Radxa says broader OS support, including Windows and Android, is on the way.
The power behind this SBC is the CD8180 SoC, made by CIX. This chip offers 12 CPU cores, including quad Cortex A720 cores running up to 2.8 GHz. 12MB of L3 cache is shared between the 12 cores. Arm's Immortalis G720 provides the GPU muscle on this SoC. It is claimed to offer "desktop-level" graphics acceleration. It has a decent feature set that supports hardware ray tracing, various popular video CODECs, and APIs like Vulkan, OpenCL, and OpenGL. Of course, it is 2024, so the SoC also packs in an NPU, claiming to deliver up to 30 TOPS.
In the intro, we mentioned that the Orion O6 has soldered RAM. Thus, unless you are a soldering ninja, you must pick a DDR5 RAM quota at purchase time and stick with it. AliExpress offered this SBC in 8, 16, 32, and 64GB 'colors,' but they all looked the same color to us. Radxa says the RAM type is DDR5-5500, and users will benefit from 100 GB/s bandwidth with this configuration.
Storage is another primary consideration when setting up any computer; thankfully, the Orion O6 is far more flexible. The board has a couple of M.2 slots, and we guess you could use USB-connected storage and a PCIe storage card if you didn't want to use the x16 slot for anything else.
Interestingly, the trio of companies behind the Orion O6 says this 'motherboard' was quickly developed. They started working on the project on July 30 this year. It powered up for the first time on September 29, and now it is said to be ready for mass production. We see all storage configurations of the Orion O6 listed for sale on AliExpress, with delivery slated for 20-40 days from now. The 8GB RAM model starts at $200. It is $240 for 16GB and $300 for 32GB, up to $450 for the 64GB SBC.
In the box, buyers will get a simple-looking heatsink and fan, an acrylic Mini ITX podium, and an I/O shield. If you want an aluminum alloy case, purchase the Development Kit option for a kit - an extra $41.
Debian and Fedora Linux are supported now, but the SBC makers say that Windows, Android, Ubuntu, Deepin, and openly in support are on the way.
