I want to be able to buy ARM boards like I'm buying ITX PC boards. I don't want a special build of Linux from the SBC OEM, I don't want weird bootloaders, firmware and other embedded-like stuff. I just want an ARM-based PC board for my desktop and server closet (so Ampere stuff is out of the picture unfortunately).

I hope Linux support for these chips matures quickly. Qualcomm's laptop chips are the only serious competitor to Apple's M-series in single core performance and power efficiency. Intel and AMD are both far behind.

I have been tinkering with the Windows Dev Kit 2023 which shares the same SoC as this board. Linux support has been improving but with only third party kernel patches. GPU support has been okay but I have noticed oddities at higher resolutions. Speaking of, none of the display port options could provide 4K at 120Hz so maybe this is one area that the Q8B can prove to be more capable; it is supposed to have an HDMI 2.1 port and two DP 1.4 capable usb-c ports.

This is a one beautiful SBC.

Apparently we might be able to run OpenBSD on it [0]

FreeBSD is unclear [1]

- [0] https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html

- [1] https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=267292

A lot of these higher-end sbc have been out-of-stock for a while now, I've been trying to find an o6 since a few months.

Yeah, qualcomm. No open datasheets/soc user manuals, no thanks.

What would it cost to fund swe and design professionals to write a 9front port with a haiku skinjob to hit milestones at 9, 18, 27 month intervals? the incubation period for Macintosh, NeXTSTEP, BeOS, HarmonyOS Next would have estimates.

If I could find a 6GB Q6A in stock (or Radxa eMMC, or fan-powered case, or most Radxa products in general) I would celebrate this announcement but they seem to be in small batch mode right now.

I just wish they had 2x5GbE like the Orion O6. i/o heavily matters for my compute nodes.

I wonder if 802.3ad bonding can bring 5gbit/s

Glancing at these benchmarks, isn't the first RVA23 SoC, the spacemiT K3, faster?

This exactly the missing laptop/lowend desktop performance bracket missing in the ARM ecosystem. Make a Mini-ITX compatible board for the SoC, upstream drivers into mainline Linux (and *BSD), and people will buy it as the low power 24/7 board for the home. Is it so fucking hard not shoot yourself in both feet?