State of Embedded: Q4 2025 Overview(sbcwiki.com) |
State of Embedded: Q4 2025 Overview(sbcwiki.com) |
I feel like there are three tiers of support that most people would be interested in:
1. Usable for headless appliances (serial console or unaccelerated graphics, wired networking, storage, USB)
2. Usable for interactive use (accelerated graphics, WiFi/BT)
3. Fully supported (all major hardware works)
You will not catch all the details this way, drivers may be incomplete, or things may not be fully integrated to work together really well, but then that's usually fixable, especially if datasheets are available.
[1] https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2024/02/21/almo...
I've not seen any other ARM provider come close to mainline support.
Full marks for Rockchip coverage, yes, they're filling in the gaps below the RK3588, although some of those chips aren't that interesting in terms of power budget and have apparently low yields.
It is not directly comparable, but AMD 8840U and V3C14 both give you 20 PCI 4.0 lanes.
Of course it is true that ARM SoCs are usually even worse in this regard.
highlighting notable advancements in ARM-based Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) and their increasing competitiveness against traditional x86 platforms.It also misses the other end - many things people think of SoC for could be done with a ESP32 or other micro controller for less cost, and this might be a better option.
I'm not completely faulting them, you have to set limits someplace. However the limits they have make this summary less useful for most people who will read it.
I've used NXP-based embedded Linux hardware from Toradex, Gateworks and EmbeddedTS in previous projects, lots of vendors out there.
One major gap I'd really like to see covered better is power consumption. We've started seeing unboxing and reviews for the Arduino Uno Q for example, but no one seems to be breaking out a simple USB power meter to get some idea how much power it takes, headless or sitting at desktop.
Pretty nice that so many chips have pretty good Linux support.
The NVIDIA solution is impressive... but self-immolated with the consumer price point (markets for government equipment may work.) People usually either have money or time... asking for both in a product is foolish.
The other SoM also have a long-tail market attention problem, as one could spend 2 weeks tracking unstable kernel driver problems. Or just drop in a $35 pi, and solve the task at hand. =3
Did you consider a ready-made USB3 extender over Ethernet? There is a reason they cost so much ;-/
NXP's IMX6/8 family is dominant in the market, really should have presence there.
And TI's ARM series, still popular in beagleboard family and used widely in the field.
And Intel's N100/N150, though I'm unsure if they're still "SBC" boards.
Allwinner, ESP32 are also major players from China.
Now apparently Qualcomm is entering the fight with new chips on Arduino UNO Q.
NXP and TI are both open source friendly, unlike broadcom. My first choice will be NXP.
Never heard about CIX.
On which note: Oh, wow, the Radxa Dragon Q6A looks great! Mainline support, good hardware, good price. Once it's back in stock I may have to buy one:)
Indeed. With 16GB RAM, NVME, integrated GPU, 1Gbps ethernet and Wi-Fi, it's basically the mean 2017-2018 laptop. External Wi-Fi antenna connectors (plural) is eye opening. Too bad it's Quectel AIC8800.
RaspberryPi is not an SoC vendor. They take proprietary SOCs from Broadcom, use proprietary firmware and build a product around it. They obviously upstream what they can, but they fundamentally are a system integrator, not an SoC vendor.
I do wonder if there is a long term wish to break their dependency on Broadcom but I suspect creating an SoC for the main Pi series is probably in the 'too difficult' category.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-sy...
I would expect such title to encompass more hardware architectures and the plethora of embedded OSes available in the industry.
- xyz vendor is not covered: For this there is a simple answer, I don't have the hardware so I can't make a fair judgement when reporting about it. I don't want to be another reporter of basic benchmark scores & 1080P Youtube playback but actually show off the hardware capabilties with the right software. Hopefully this will be possible with more in the future as this project grows
- This is only one sector of the space why don't you have micro controllers or x86: While I want to cover all aspects of the space I am not an embedded engineer. I started during covid with the goal to replace my X86 homelab server with an ARM one to save power and got deeper into the rabbit hole until I ended up maintaining some boards and doing some Debian/Ubuntu based bring ups in my freetime. This led to me wanting to have one place to share my findings along the way and document things that might leave one stranded in the world of Yocto/U-Boot/Linux Kernel/Device-Trees/etc. and I created sbcwiki.com, not only for me to share my findings but for others to contribute with simple markdown files to the GitHub repo too.
[1] https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35...
Raspberry Pi and its AI HAT+ seems to be the most accessible, often others can easily pick it up the basics and get up and running without much trouble even without experience.
I wonder if there is any alternative? Raspberry Pi 5 + the 26 TOPS HAT+ is not cheap.
It's a slightly different approach -- Beagleboard is a non-profit and emphasizes openly purchasable components. But similar in that it is the cheapest way to tinker with SoCs from that vendor.
BeagleY-AI has 4 TOPS for ~$70. AI inference tooling is still improving but I've been working on it here: https://docs.beagleboard.org/boards/beagley/ai/demos/using-e...
Combined they're like $250? Not expensive.
On the other hand, at that price maybe you ought to get a Jetson Orin Nano.
I don't see any option to sort by network speed or network chip
There are a couple of bananapi router boards that have 1 maybe 2 SFP+
On the other hand, CIX have been putting actual Arm v9 hardware in developers' hands for some time.
For my project I am making a SLAM/VIO using it, see video: https://x.com/_asadmemon/status/1977737626951041225
Available for NXP IMX8M, Amlogic A311D and RK3588
Update: And mainline support and lack of proprietary boot blobs are two separate criteria. I've heard that NXP offers the former but not the latter.
If you are talking bare metal rather than Linux support, many M-core MCUs are easy, and some of these (e. g. STM32H7) actually have usable 1995-level desktop performance sans MMU, ergo enough for many things that aren't web browsing. It's A-cores that's closed, because vendors have zero incentives to open them up and because the whole thing is a heap of Synopsys modules ducktaped together - and Synopsys has an less incentive to open up. And then of course, there are GPUs, that's not well supported even on x86. Video out - yes, you get it with UEFI GOP, but usually no multihead. You also get it on many ARM SoCs - the video output generator is sometimes documented, it's accelerator/compute that's universally closed.
https://theamphour.com/687-the-rp2350-with-the-raspberry-pi-...
It makes me look at my way over specced workstation (for significantly more than $150) wondering why I am burning so much electricity daily. Should use a micro desktop for the web and just remote into my beefy workstation as required.
Using stripped down versions of win iot, they were fantastic.
The oem keys are legit fyi.
Which, fine, I get it that most people don't need or want more than that, but I shouldn't have to jump up 3x in power draw and heat and 5x in cost to go to HEDT to get far more lanes than I actually need. I'm lookin for enough PCIe for a couple of SSDs, maybe a third, and I dunno, more than one goddamn slot to be wired to my CPU without compromises? Every ATX motherboard for consumers brags about all their slots but they're all only x4, squeezed through the PCH's 4 lanes. Just because I have a high bandwidth capture card, a 10/25/40/100Gb NIC, and a GPU doesn't mean I want to only give one of them far more bandwidth than it needs to the CPU and compromise on the rest.
I need like, 32 lanes. Not 64 in a Threadripper. Not 128828182 or whatever comes on a brand new $10,000k EPYC, I need 32, and don't waste em on a bunch fo flaky USB crap I can't use. Don't give me a fucking oculink port. I want to use the slots. That i have. In my computer. That I can screw the card into securely and power without an additional power supply. I can't be the only one.
The only board that I own that does both at the same time is the Pine64 Quartz64 that uses the RK3566. My Pinebook Pro doesn't have an ethernet port, Orange Pi 5 Max has ethernet but doesn't use the builtin controller to provide it.
awge0: flags=0x8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
ec_capabilities=0x1<VLAN_MTU>
ec_enabled=0x1<VLAN_MTU>
address: 26:80:xx:xx:xx:xx
media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT full-duplex)Its a nice little SoM, in some ways it was better than the pi5 for hardware media encoding. =3