I’ve been wondering the same, suspecting that there might be chip variants.
Upcoming ARM v9 product with 45 TOPS NPU
Yes, CD8180 is for SBC, yes, we have a dedicated code name for the chip, more flexible on the voltage/frequency, CP8180 is for PC, consume level, more stable, at least this is what they said from CIX.
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Yes, but as far as I could see there is no board that has all of them available for user.
What uses those in Rock5B? USB
Same thing, I’m thinking about those available to use vs things that there are already available on board (no 10G)
For NAS build something is needed to connect hard drives and networking, this is all that we have.
PCIE 4.0 2x should be ok for 10G NIC (even for two 10G), but we will need to wait some time for cards that uses pcie 4.0
+1
Thanks for reminding me about this. @willy very nice setup! 
I’m trying with PEX8725 + 2x AQC113 + 2x nvme (or sata card in future). This should be perfect for NAS with both network and storage wired via full pcie 3.0 4x.
Both (exynos and cix) are close, both significantly faster than A76 on RK3588.
Of course as we all know - those two are early tests, not optimised yet and GB has its own problems. With mature SOC like RK3588 there are many results to check out, here we have only those and probably they are not optimised yet.
10G stuff is really cheap today. Cat6 can work with those on shorter distances (2.5G is ok for sure),
Wifi7 routers without 6GHz band can go beyond 5G, with 6GHz they may reach more than 10G, and this stuff is accessible. Two years ago I could not find any affordable router with at least one sfp+, now there is great choice
We will see more and more devices with such networking. I think 5G is death end, better than 2.5G, but most already jumped into 10G.
That is why I was interested only in single core results.
BTW: it’s the first time I see board with big/medium/small cores, this makes GB multi core method even more nonsense.
@hipboi, thanks for the details, that makes sense now. Be careful however, on the public sheets it’s written at a few points “>100 GB/s” for the DRAM bandwidth, but that’s actually not the case, as DDR-5500 in 128 bits is 88 GB/s. Only the 6400 model (maybe CP8180) is 100 GB/s. Also on one of the BIOS screenshots it’s written “2.6 GHz” while the doc mentions 2.8 GHz, that may also cast some doubts. Regardless, the platform is super interesting in anycase 
The Gen2 PCIe lanes on RK3588/RK3588S(2)/RK3582/RK3583 are all behind Combo Pipe PHYs and multiplexed with USB3/SATA. Situation with Rock 5B explained here.
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Is there a microsd lot ?
It seems Arace is accepting pre-orders.
Specwise feels nice. Cortex-A720 has MTE, MPAM, SVE, SVE2 and many other cpu features I would like to play with.
But boardwise? No traces of SoC in mainline kernel nor in EDK2-platforms. “@cixtech.com” is present in THREE kernel commits.
This is Arm. Mainline support is not granted.
I wanted Arm desktop 10 years ago. Gave up on getting such a few years ago. And then board appears without trace of support.
How many months/years it will take to get it fully supported in mainline?
Yes but prohibitive shipping costs to Europe unfortunately (dhl/fedex) 
mmmm i was thinking, if the main PCI-E slot support bifurcation maybe Radxa could make an adapter board to 4 M.2 slots @ x2 4.0? It would be great for NAS.
There are already plenty of boards doing that, and some even using a PCIe bridge, without requiring bifurcation. I don’t see much value for Radxa in creating yet another one, it’s like making one’s own RAID or SATA card.
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Because the pcie is x8 electrical, the adapters in the market that relies on bifurcation would be only be able to do 2 M.2 at x4. So it is only possible with adapters that include a bridge, and those will likely be super expensive or sacrifice perf.
If instead you build one adapter you should be able to do 4 M.2 slots each one x2 4.0 PCIE, if it is wired correctly for this case, no bridge and nothing fancy requiered, just the M.2 slots and some supporting electronics to handle power delivery.
8 M.2 @ x1 4.0 might be possible too, it all depends on the bifurcation capabilities of the SoC.
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There’s still some choice, in 5 minutes of searching I could find:
- PCIe x1 to 4x NVME via a bridge for 35 EUR
- PCIe x4 to 4x NVME via bifurcation for 84 EUR
- PCIe x8 to 4x NVME via a bridge for 137 EUR
I don’t find these overly excessive. Also the benefit of the bridge is that any device can run at full speed, even though I agree that 2xGen4 is already great for a single device. Bifurcation requires support from the PCIe controller and I don’t know if all support many combinations. The fact that I can’t seem to find a passive x8->4*x2 seems to indicate that support even on PCs is not granted :-/
Based on the pricing of the items you found I would suspect that the PCIe switches used there are Gen3 or even Gen2, aren’t they?
One thing people await now for years is something like a QNAP QM2-4P-484: x8 to 4 x x2 but with a Gen4 switch (the older QM2-4P-384 and QM2-4P-284 are based on Gen3/Gen2 switches)
Interesting point regarding PCIe speeds. The x4 one is shown as being usable with many serial ports and doesn’t mention any speed, so it could very well be a gen2 or so.
The other one (e.g. that one) explicitly says PCIe 4.0, and it gets an x8 connector. It can be found from 137 to 155 EUR on the same site depending on vendors, it’s just hard to search (aliexpress search engine…).
For the 84 EUR one, I just can’t find it anymore at the moment (search engine again) so I can’t check.
And that’s misleading or outright wrong since the specs mention the PCIe switch being an ASM2824 which is PCIe Gen3 only. So it works in PCIe Gen4 and even Gen5 slots but the negotiated speed with both host and devices will always be Gen3.
Since that one mentioned bifurcation there’s no PCIe switch involved which could downgrade the speed so if I understand correctly ‘all’ you have to deal within a passive Gen4 setup is signal integrity which then might downgrade the negotiated speed to Gen3 or even Gen2 based on results of link training
All that is fairly plausible, that’s the magic of aliexpress. I too tend to search for chips to verify the specs, but here I didn’t see it :-/
I also noticed that,
73€ DHL and 83€ fedex, both of them will charge yet another 15€ for import duties + tax,
$80 for shipping to USA,
32GB RAM option with case and including all costs will be about 500€ (and roughly the same in $)
Also I see that all packages are now about 2-3x times more expensive (even for smaller things like X4). I expect that this policy is caused by christmas delays, I’ve seen this in few shops, on the other hand it’s pre-order with postponed delivery, when prices should be normal and some cheaper options (like 4px) should be yet again available.
@Arace @Arace-Martin @Eric-Arace - any chance for a change?
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Looks like an awesome machine!
Will there be a fanless metal case?
Is the sound card at least decent? With previous onboard sound on the Rock 5B I recall it had awful background noise and I had to use a USB sound card to not have that.
I am Crush from Arace shop.
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