In this quarters update, we explore recent developments in the embedded Single Board Computer (SBC) market, highlighting notable advancements in ARM-based Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) and their increasing competitiveness against traditional x86 platforms. We review the major achievements and near-future expectations from key industry vendors.
NVIDIA #
On October 13, 2025, NVIDIA’s DGX Spark was officially released (after being announced in Q1) powered by the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip. It uses 20x Arm Cores (10 Cortex-X925 + 10 Cortex-A725), has 128 GB unified system memory and the Grace Blackwell Gen GPU has 6,144 CUDA Cores with 5th Generation Tensor Cores + FP4 support. The MSRP for the DGX Spark is $3999 while there are also OEM offerings at different price points available.
There is no word about the rumoured Windows on Arm devices using the GB10 yet but the DGX Spark runs on their custom Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble) software stack while the Jetson’s official software support got silently dropped being stuck on Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver). Let’s hope the DGX Spark doesn’t get the same treatment later in its lifecycle.
What seems to have went under the radar is the NVIDIA DGX Station which was supposed to release with a 72-core CPU and Blackwell Ultra GPU (Reference: Notebookcheck). The only specs we could find are from the Dell Pro Max with GB300 (also with 72 cores), 496GB LPDDR5X CPU memory, 288GB HBM3e GPU memory, supporting up to 1 trillion parameter models with 20 Petaflops (20,000 TFLOPS) of FP4 computing power.
Qualcomm #
Flagship SoC: Snapdragon Oryon X1 Elite
After the rumors about a Snapdragon Oryon X2 featuring 18 Oryon V3 cores at the beginning of the year, we have got confirmation with the official launch of the Oryon X2 in September 2025. They will be the first mainstream ARM SoC’s hitting the 5GHz mark as well as solid IPC improvements throughout. Products with it will launch at the beginning of 2026 and we are curious to get our hands on a device equipped with it to bring our perspective to this series.
But this wasn’t all the exciting things that happened with Qualcomm. Radxa announced their Dragon Q6A SBC using the Dragonwing QCS6490 SoC which we covered here first. While one might think this is yet another SoC, products using it actually come with full mainline support for the CPU, Adreno GPU as well as the Hexagon NPU opening up quite some competition to Raspberry Pi at a price point starting at 69.90$ for the base model. They also introduced their “200 TOPS” local AI machine the Radxa Airbox Q900 using the QCS9075 which comes in at $599 making it more than 6.5x cheaper than the NVIDIA DGX Spark and we’re excited to bring coverage about it soon to see if can hold up against NVIDIA’s broad software support!
What nobody expected was Qualcomm taking over Arduino, the microcontroller company, and introducing that sector to SBCs with the Arduino UNO Q using another Dragonwing SoC, the QRB2210. This SBC coming in at $44 also has proper mainline support (for three years now) and shows that Qualcomm is trying to disrupt and establish themselves in the IOT / Edge computing market in a serious way. How this acquisition is going to play out for exisiting Arduino products is to be seen, but we’re excited to see all the new developments in person at next years Embedded World in Germany.
Rockchip #
Current Flagship SoC: RK3588
The Rockchip Developer conference (RKDC in short) this year gave us a clear outlook for their upcoming hardware. These include the highly anticipated RK3688 (4-5nm, 300K DMIPS+) and R3668 (5-6nm, 200K DMIPS+), but also interim variants like a RK3572 (which we’ll soon see in Zero sized SBC’s). At the event we also got the first look at a product with the next Gen Arm Mali Magni (now known as Arm G1 Pro / Premium / Ultra).
Here are the specs that we could aggregrate together:
RK3688
RK3668
RK3572
- 8 core CPU: 2x Cortex-A73 @ 2.3GHz + 6x Cortex-A53 @ 2.0GHz
- 32-bit LPDDR4/4x, LPDDR5/5x
- UFS 2.1 Storage
- Arm Mali G310 GPU
- 3 TOPS NPU
- VPU 4K@120FPS decoder & 4K@30FPS encoder
On the software front Rockchips BSP Kernel is still surprisingly getting updates (now at version 6.1.118) on the main repo so it wasn’t a one time thing we saw in Q1, but many vendors are still on a year or two older fork with Friendlyelec and Radxa usually being a positive example in staying up to date. Armbian also has an open PR for the latest version but is in the testing phase before publishing it for every board in their offering.
We now also have access to the develop-6.6 branch which could be seen as rkr6.6-rkr1 on GitHub but there is no implementation of it that we know of.
On a side note: The MPP software licensing issues still persist with a Rockchip developer only showing an image that the refactor was in process, but that was in January of 2025. See LGPL violations thread on GitHub
Open-source efforts:
- Mainline Linux 6.16
- Mainline Linux 6.18
- USB-C (fusb302) support
- Rocket NPU driver for RK3588 from Tomeu Vizoso
- DP Bridge support
- PHY MIPI CSI DPHY support
- Mesa
- Active PanVK Vulkan development is continuing on RK3588’s Mali G610, currently supporting Vulkan 1.4 from Vulkan 1.1 in Q1.
Flagship SoC: Dimensity 9500 & Kompanio Ultra 910 (MT8396)
While it looked like MediaTek was rushing to catch up to other ARM vendors at the beginning of the year, they took things slow and are working on proper software support together with Collabora and other consultancies before we got to see other board vendors release their hardware based on a Mediatek SoC.
We know that Libre Computer is working on a board with Genio 700 (MT8390) as well as Radxa on a board with Genio 510 (MT8370) called Nio-5A, but both are not released yet while we should see them in more hands this Q4 if everything goes well.
On the Chromebook SoC front, MediaTek’s MT8196 (Kompanio Ultra 910), based on the Dimensity 9400 chipset is now in multiple laptop form factor products (first ArmV9 laptops) available to purchase and Collabora has been working hard ever since on mainline support for these devices, but it can take a while.
In the meantime they have released their flagship mobile SoC the Dimensity 9500 which reached impressive GeekBench6 results of: Single-Core Score 3473 | Multi-Core Score 10264 | Compute Score (GPU) 24891. Its CPU uses an octa core layout (1x Arm C1-Ultra, 3x Arm C1-Premium, 4x Arm C1-Pro) and the GPU is an Arm Mali-G1 Ultra MC12.
For the people interested in their Router SoC offering Sinovoip BananaPi released their BPI-R4 Pro which comes in at 180$ and offers 2x 10GbE SFP+ / RJ45 (multiplexed) and 4x 2.5GbE ports.
Raspberry Pi has introduced their desktop computer, the 500+ which is the awaited upgrade to the Pi 500 with the M.2 socket populated and built into a mechanical keyboard. For a more in depth coverage about it check out this review from Bret.dk
CIX #
Flagship SoC: Still CD8180 / P1 but CD8160 is now available too
Notable Products this quarter: Radxa Orion-O6N & OrangePi 6 Plus
After Cix estabilished their bumpy release at the beginning of the year, we’re now seeing more products coming out with their SoC. These would be the Radxa Orion O6N and OrangePi 6 Plus which both are similar Nano-ITX sized boards using the binned to 2.6GHz CD8160 SoC.
At the same time after a long eleven revisions the first steps for a mainline device-tree were accepted into linux. Device-Tree support is very early and not ready to be used for desktop computing compared to booting via ACPI which is also possible with this chip. The main reason we’re looking forward to the device-tree adoption is for usage of the Panthor GPU driver with this SoC’s Mali G720 GPU which is already supported by Mesa and the kernel driver but only via device-tree.
Even here there were some new methods discussed since there are ways to attach device-tree aspects to ACPI so maybe we will get even better mainline support soon while CIX backported Panthor with ACPI to their BSP in the last couple days.
For the people wondering about Windows on Arm support or even FreeBSD, both boot on the Orion O6, but also experience the issue with missing drivers for many of the exciting aspects of the Cix P1.
Texas Instruments #
Flagship SoCs: AM68, AM69
TI has shifted its focus more on automotive and large volume products, so there has not been anything new since the Q1 2025: State of Embedded article
Meanwhile the Imagination BXS-4-64 (also known as BXM-4-64) used in the SK-AM68 and SK-AM69 devkits as well as in many RISC-V chips has seen further driver work being done upstream which has been covered in these Phoronix articles with PR’s being sent roughly every 6 months (sorted by most recent):
Other #
DENX retired: “After 20 successful years in the embedded world, the DENX holders decided to wind-down operations”. They’re known for making the U-Boot that is deployed in millions, probably billions of devices. Former engineers continue at the spiritual successor Nabla.
Synaptics is releasing a new SBC with Toradex using the: Astra SL1680 SoC. It uses 4x Cortex-A73 cores delivering up to 40000 DMIPS, NPU with up to 7.9+ TOPS, PowerVR Series9XE GE9920 GPU, and can decode 4K video (even AV1) and encode at 1080P.
Conclusion #
Q4 2025 saw the embedded SBC market advance, led by Qualcomm’s Arduino acquisition, mainline Dragonwing SoCs, and AI becoming more affordable. Rockchip unveiled roadmaps for RK3688/RK3668 with solid kernel updates and PanVK progress. NVIDIA launched DGX Spark, while MediaTek focused on upstream Linux support for Genio/Kompanio. CIX grew with new boards, Raspberry Pi added the 500+ model, and TI held steady. The ARM SBC ecosystem is still thriving especially against x86, fuelled by open-source, AI NPUs, and software improvements.
Author: Mecid Urganci
I’m a full time Applied Cognitive and Media science student who in his free time loves to tinker. This sparked an interest in embedded hardware, which I try to make more accessible with this platform I created “SBCwiki”. You can find me on X/Twitter at @mecoscorner and on GitHub at @HeyMeco