October 29, 2025
Watt wars & vendor beef
Beyond RaspberryPi: What are all the other SoC vendors up to *summarised*
Tiny PC turf war: fans hype cheap boards, rage over missing power, NXP snub
TLDR: Big news: Qualcomm’s new 5GHz chips and cheap boards challenge pricey NVIDIA gear. The crowd’s split between excitement and skepticism, demanding power numbers, fiber‑fast networking, and coverage of NXP and RISC‑V before calling anything a Raspberry Pi killer.
SBCwiki’s Q4 snapshot drops a buffet of tiny-computer drama: NVIDIA’s splashy DGX Spark at $3999, Qualcomm’s 5GHz Oryon X2 chips arriving in 2026, and budget upstarts like Radxa’s $69 board and $599 “200 TOPS” Airbox promising local AI on the cheap. Plus, plot twist: Qualcomm now owns Arduino, rolling out the $44 UNO Q. The vibe? Equal parts hype and side‑eye.
Commenters instantly turned it into a reality show. One camp’s cheering the deep‑dive format (“more rumors, more merges, more tea”), while practical folks demand receipts: power consumption. The meme of the day: “Watts or it didn’t happen.” Another thread fixates on network nerdery, asking for fiber‑fast SFP+ ports and better ways to sort by speed—“is this a PC or a potato?” Meanwhile, an NXP loyalist calls out the article for snubbing a major vendor that quietly ships lots of industrial boards. And the RISC‑V crowd shows up with their perennial question: “Anything new?”
NVIDIA’s past Jetson support drop has people nervously clutching their Ubuntu manuals, wondering if DGX Spark gets ghosted later. The hot tension: shiny specs vs. software support. Fans love Qualcomm + Arduino’s “maker to mini‑PC” crossover, but the courtroom verdict isn’t in until someone brings a USB power meter and a watt chart.
Key Points
- •NVIDIA released DGX Spark on Oct 13, 2025, using the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip with 20 Arm cores, 128 GB unified memory, and a GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores, 5th‑gen Tensor Cores, and FP4 support.
- •DGX Spark runs a custom Ubuntu 24.04 stack and is priced at $3,999; Jetson’s official support is reported stuck on Ubuntu 18.04.
- •A 72‑core DGX Station was expected; Dell’s Pro Max page lists a GB300 configuration with 72 cores, 496 GB LPDDR5X CPU memory, 288 GB HBM3e GPU memory, and up to 20 PFLOPS FP4.
- •Qualcomm officially launched the Oryon X2 in Sept 2025 (18 Oryon V3 cores), the first mainstream ARM SoC to reach 5 GHz, with products expected in early 2026.
- •Radxa announced the Dragon Q6A (QCS6490) with full mainline support starting at $69.90 and the Airbox Q900 (QCS9075) at $599; Arduino introduced the UNO Q (QRB2210) at $44 with mainline support.