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Orion O6 ITX Arm V9 board – temper your expectations

When I first heard about Radxa's Orion O6, it was being compared to Apple's M1 silicon, and the product page has extraordinary claims: - World's First Open Source Arm V9 Motherboard - Higher Performance, Lower Power Consumption, Better Security - The following performance graph: As always, when I see a graph like that without any axis labels, alarm bells start going off. It's a marketing tactic used by Apple, Nvidia, and well, most players who want to make hardware seem even more impressive than it is, and generate early buzz.

My primary motivation for this post: early marketing for this board started a hype train that will not deliver the results people expect. I'm guessing what Radxa means is "it runs open source software", but that's a lot different than the label that's currently topmost on their product page: I really wish Radxa and CIX would spend the time to refine their bringup process to the point where the first pre-orders will arrive with a fully-supported feature set, and hardware that punches above its price in a good way.

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