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.
If independent testing backs the performance and price claims, local and on-device LLM deployments gain a lower-power, lower-cost alternative.