Axera

Headlines · 2

1. 1d
   Sipeed unveils MaixStation, a $3,999 Chinese rival to Nvidia's DGX Spark

   Sipeed announced the MaixStation, a mini PC built on Axera's new AX8860P: 16 Arm Cortex-A55 cores plus an in-house NPU rated at 256 TOPS FP4 without sparsity, with 128GB of LPDDR5X on a 256-bit bus at 273 GB/s, running Debian 13 and Linux 6.18. Sipeed told Tom's Hardware the 128GB model should cost about $3,999, with a Kickstarter campaign at the end of the year, shipping within three months of it closing, and an NPU toolchain due by the end of this month; the company claims vLLM, SGLang and PyTorch support. It says a single node runs Qwen 27B with 25% faster prefill and 30% faster decode than the DGX Spark, but in its email claims only about a 10% lead on both with FP4 on each machine and speculative decoding off, calling wider-margin runs unofficial. For comparison, the 128GB DGX Spark lists at $6,950 and the 128GB AMD Ryzen AI Halo at $3,999.99.

   Tom’s Hardware · 🔥 4
2. 3d
   Axera launches AX8860 AI chip, claims 25% faster LLM inference than DGX Spark

   Axera unveiled its AX8860 series AI chip at the 2026 China International Industry Fair, positioning it as a compute base for running large models at the edge and on-device. The chip pairs a 16-core Arm Cortex-A55 CPU with a self-developed NPU rated at 256 TOPS (native FP4, no sparsity), supports up to 128GB of LPDDR5X memory with 273 GB/s of bandwidth over a 256-bit bus, is built on a 6nm process and offers PCIe 5.0 connectivity. Form factors include a 40W module, a single-slot PCIe card and a single-slot four-chip design that Axera claims reaches 1024 TOPS at roughly 80% scaling efficiency, plus planned Mini PCs and Pocket PCs; software support covers vLLM, SGLang and PyTorch with an OpenAI-compatible API, alongside the newly announced Yuanxi A256S module. Axera and Sipeed claim the chip is 25% faster on prefill and 30% faster on decode than NVIDIA's DGX Spark on Qwen 27B, at close to half the price (DGX Spark lists at $4,999 for 64GB and $6,950 for 128GB) — claims that have not been independently verified.

   Wccftech · 🔥 0

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