A Chinese Challenger Appears 🥊

Chinese competitors have long made LLMs interesting on the software side. (DeepSeek, anyone?)

So it makes sense that now they’re trying to compete on the hardware side, too, in the form of an all-Chinese mini PC that is apparently pocketable.

Sipeed, most likely best known in the West for their NanoKVM devices, just announced the MaixStation, an AI hub that is promising a 128GB of unified memory and more performance than a DGX Spark for $3,999. If that price sounds familiar, that was the amount that the DGX Spark was going for a year ago; it now sells for nearly twice as much. The MaixStation, beyond promising a lower price, is also a machine closer in size to a standard mini PC, while promising to only need a 65W charger to run.

At the center of this shockingly small machine? The Axera AX8860P, an ARM-based chip that Sipeed and fellow Chinese SBC maker Radxa have been making some big claims about.

I’ll point out that Sipeed devices haven’t always been easy to come by. I briefly played with a Sipeed Tang FPGA and found it hard to get shipped through Amazon, with delays often stretching back months. (Who knows what role the tariff situation is playing there?) But that said, it’s nice to have a new option that isn’t just the same old thing in a different enclosure. (With apologies to Framework and anyone else sticking an impressive chip in a relatively small box.)

Hot-Plugging

Sucks to be TP-Link right now

If you’ve shopped for a high-end wireless router anytime within the last couple of years (an important feature for any Mini PC enthusiast), you probably know that TP-Link tends to hit closest to the price-performance sweet spot. But it’s long been dogged with questions about its Chinese origins, issues that have only become more prominent in the months since the FCC required pre-approval for new routers.

Last week, TP-Link got sued by five states that have suggested the router brand has failed to truly sever its ties to the Chinese market, based on past reporting from Bloomberg. (As one might guess, the states suing have a particular lean in their politics.)

The company, which has more or less dominated the home router market for the past few years, isn’t willing to cede ground to Netgear quite so easily. This week, it sent a letter to the FCC claiming that it was ready to play ball in the American market:

TP-Link is proposing to invest nearly $1 billion in new U.S.-based research and development and manufacturing capabilities. This investment would build upon TP-Link’s existing U.S. footprint, which includes a global headquarters in Irvine, Calif., and more than 700 U.S. employees. As part of this investment, TP-Link would begin assembling these Wi-Fi 8 devices in the United States by next year, and the devices will incorporate software and firmware developed, written, and stored in the United States by TP-Link’s U.S. engineering organization. All told, the contemplated investment would result in the creation of hundreds of high-paying research and development, manufacturing, and construction jobs for American workers over the next four years.

It’s not entirely clear whether TP-Link will be able to clear its name with China-skeptical politicians, but this much is true: This likely, at least temporarily, creates a gap in the market that competitors will rush through.

(By the way, in case you’re in need of a life-dominating hobby, did you know that you can actually buy Wi-Fi 7 router kits on Amazon? I guarantee you the parts in the Banana Pi BPI-R4 WiFi 7 won’t pass FCC scrutiny anytime soon.)

Mini-Links

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ88PPiAsl8

I look forward to being able to afford this a decade from now.

» RTX Spark machines just hit the market earlier today, and some early reviews suggest that, at least from an AI standpoint, these new machines are worth the hype, if maybe not the price. The LTT Labs take on the laptops (we’ve yet to see a desktop review) suggests a not unexpected oversell on many elements of the devices. If you want insights in video form, I recommend Alex Ziskind’s take.

» The AMD AI machines continue to march on, though. And many are coming from manufacturers that have never before hit the space. iBuyPower, best known for its custom-built desktop towers, just put out its first mini PC, and it’s based on the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495.

**» If you’re sick of hearing about $4,000 machines** you’ll never be able to afford, how about a new single-board machine that might be in your nerding-out budget? The OrangePi O1, selling for [$300](https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256813069573652.html)-$500 on AliExpress, notably combines ARM and RISC-V processing power on a single machine, while also making room for tons of ports. There’s even a port that’s often been missing from most modern mini PCs: SATA. Welcome back, old friend.

Jargon Clarifier

RISC-V

An emerging CPU instruction set architecture (ISA) that is positioned as something of a competitor to x86 and ARM processors. Unlike those architectures, it is fully “free and open,” meaning that anyone can make chips based on the architecture. At this point, its high end is nowhere near that of what x86 or ARM can do, which has limited its use cases mostly to embedded systems and some single-board computers. (It is leading to a lot of collaboration, including between the U.S. and China, which suggests if TP-Link wants to get politicians off its back, it should invest in RISC-V.) That said, there is at least one RISC-V mini PC out there, the Firefly AIBOX-K3, which sports a chip apparently capable of running 30-billion parameter AI models. Because everything has to be AI. Personally, my favorite use case for RISC-V is the Pinecil, a soldering iron from Pine64 that has a RISC-V brain.

Deal Watch

» What’s a Firebat? An enemy in a Link to the Past knockoff, sure, but also a brand of mini PCs, one of which, rocking a Ryzen 7 H 255, is going for $469 on Amazon.

» Need just a little more oomph than an N100? The BOSGAME E7, rocking a Core i3 100U, is selling for less than $300 on Amazon, and it even has 16 gigs of DDR4.

» Got a GPU and nowhere to dock it? Give the GPD G2 eGPU a look. It’s capable of USB4 Version 2, which is a less elegant way of saying “Thunderbolt 5.” It’s also on sale for $399, and can deliver up to 800 watts of power for your silicon wind tunnel.

» In case you find yourself in need of a larger SSD these days, you know how hard it is out there. But at least some units are creeping under the $300 mark, notably this DATO Gen4 SSD, which is capable of speeds up to 7200 megabytes per second.

Mini PCs In History

The 386 processor that all the embedded systems used

For most end users, the Intel 386 line was dead as a doornail in 1994, with 486 machines extremely common and the Pentium starting to stream out to consumers.

But Intel had other plans for this chip, which it had introduced nine years earlier. In August of 1994, the company launched the 386EX, a processor that was intended to give its aging processor line a new home within the niche but still lucrative space of embedded systems. After all, conveyor belts need computing capabilities, too. But to get to where they needed to go, a few things needed to be cut out of these platforms, most notably a floppy disk. As a 1995 EDN piece noted, this wasn’t necessarily a problem for its use case. But you’ll have to do a lot of work to make it usable as a traditional computer:

If you’re building a “real” PC with the 386EX, you’ll need to add a few more peripheral devices, such as graphics, memory controllers, a keyboard, a real-time clock, a parallel port, and perhaps circuitry to generate the ISA bus signals if you plan to support some add-in cards.

That more or less ensured that these systems would rarely peek their heads out of the industrial doldrums, the kind of places where you might see an Arduino or Raspberry Pi today. But these chips nonetheless crept out into enthusiast contexts anyway.

One company particularly invested in the idea that these old 386 embedded chips could make good small computers was the German company Taskit, which sold two such devices, the MINI-PC and the 386EX-Card III, which was described as “one the smallest DOS computers on the market.” At 54mm by 96mm, it was only slightly larger than the standard dimensions of a Raspberry Pi.

These machines were not meant for plugging into an HDMI port and a PS2 keyboard. They didn’t have those ports. Rather, the assumption was that you would use it with a serial port through the console, rather than plugging in a monitor or keyboard. In other words, these were mini PCs for hardcore nerds and engineering types, rather than set-it-and-forget-it Mac Mini fans.

If you feel like getting your hands on a processor that was outdated upon its initial release, you can’t do much better than eBay, where such boards are out there, if not exactly common … or cheap. (Example: A 386EX-Card III listed on eBay as “rare” is currently selling for right around $1,000.) An alternative in the same vein that is likely going to be a bit friendlier for retro computing fans is the Vortex86DX, which is compatible with the 386 and tends to have more enthusiast interest. There’s also the more recent Pixel x86, which is built for retro gaming, but where’s the fun in that?

You must connect to a serial port to use a computer that’s this small and old, obviously.

OK, that’s it for this edition of Boxed News. My headline is with the $4,000 computer, but my heart is with the 386. Got any tips for us, anything we should be covering? Shoot me an email at ernie@tedium.co! Thanks!