State of Embedded: Q4 2025 Overview | Hacker News Reader

State of Embedded: Q4 2025 Overview

sbcwiki.com

137 pointsHeyMeco77 comments

Something I'd be very interested in seeing summarized is the current state of fully open source software on SoCs and SBCs. I hate how common the situation described in the nVidia section where SoCs that require vendor kernels get abandoned on ancient software, so it would be very useful to know what SoCs are supported to a useful level by mainline kernels.

I feel like there are three tiers of support that most people would be interested in:

1. Usable for headless appliances (serial console or unaccelerated graphics, wired networking, storage, USB)

2. Usable for interactive use (accelerated graphics, WiFi/BT)

3. Fully supported (all major hardware works)

I'm guessing this is why, as others have already mentioned, there seems to be an increase in use of x86 processors like the N100. You don't need to worry about stuff like specific vendor kernels.

yeah, x86 BIOS/UEFI plus VESA provides for a not-great but decently usable foundation. Easy enough to hand-code a hello world in assembly - good luck trying to do that one on any ARM system.

> any ARM system

If you are talking bare metal rather than Linux support, many M-core MCUs are easy, and some of these (e. g. STM32H7) actually have usable 1995-level desktop performance sans MMU, ergo enough for many things that aren't web browsing. It's A-cores that's closed, because vendors have zero incentives to open them up and because the whole thing is a heap of Synopsys modules ducktaped together - and Synopsys has an less incentive to open up. And then of course, there are GPUs, that's not well supported even on x86. Video out - yes, you get it with UEFI GOP, but usually no multihead. You also get it on many ARM SoCs - the video output generator is sometimes documented, it's accelerator/compute that's universally closed.

It's always possible to just go to dts directory in latest Linux kernel, and just look for what's enabled on SoC or board level, for a quick apprisal of level of mainline support.

You will not catch all the details this way, drivers may be incomplete, or things may not be fully integrated to work together really well, but then that's usually fixable, especially if datasheets are available.

Are there any recent ARM SoCs that are fully supported by mainline kernel and don't have weird proprietary blobby boot chain?

Well, a 5-year-old chip may not count as "recent" but the RK-3588 boot chain is "almost fully open-source" [1]. And it seems like it took a major amount of effort (from Collabora, others) to get it this far. I don't know of any equivalent or newer chips that are "more" open, but would love to hear if there are.

[1] https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2024/02/21/almo...

Yeah, Collabora has done good job on rk chips, but even then there are still missing bits and pieces. At least for rk3588 they are documented nicely: https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35...

And the NPU part is also in the mainline kernel https://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2025/07/rockchip-npu-update-6-w...

NXP i.MX, TI, STM32MP

What are the most recent and/or highest performance of these?

Update: And mainline support and lack of proprietary boot blobs are two separate criteria. I've heard that NXP offers the former but not the latter.

RK stuff I believe is the closest. I believe it still has a binary blob for the GPU but generally a lot of the other stuff is mainline.

I've not seen any other ARM provider come close to mainline support.

I agree having this info more plainly available would be great, but in the interim interested folks can take a look at postmarketos device support, collabora blogs, and the pine64 wiki to get some of this info.

Huh. It mentions neither Intel nor AMD, and I am seeing _a lot_ of N100/N150 industrial SBCs right now (outside the hobbyist space). Intel in particular seems to be replaying their approach of flooding the market with Atom chips and making N-series available to OEMs in volume and relatively low price.

Full marks for Rockchip coverage, yes, they're filling in the gaps below the RK3588, although some of those chips aren't that interesting in terms of power budget and have apparently low yields.

The N100/150's are great.

My biggest frustration with Intel Twin Lake (2025 Nxxx series) is its anemic PCIe configuration. 9 lanes is pretty restrictive, but the real kicker is them being only PCIe 3.0 in a SoC released in 2025(!).

It is not directly comparable, but AMD 8840U and V3C14 both give you 20 PCI 4.0 lanes.

Of course it is true that ARM SoCs are usually even worse in this regard.

TBF that's usually my frustration with any consumer level chip. I get it takes die space and power, but even high-end non-HEDT platforms still cap out at just enough PCIe lanes for the common loadout of "One GPU at x16, One SSD at x4".

Which, fine, I get it that most people don't need or want more than that, but I shouldn't have to jump up 3x in power draw and heat and 5x in cost to go to HEDT to get far more lanes than I actually need. I'm lookin for enough PCIe for a couple of SSDs, maybe a third, and I dunno, more than one goddamn slot to be wired to my CPU without compromises? Every ATX motherboard for consumers brags about all their slots but they're all only x4, squeezed through the PCH's 4 lanes. Just because I have a high bandwidth capture card, a 10/25/40/100Gb NIC, and a GPU doesn't mean I want to only give one of them far more bandwidth than it needs to the CPU and compromise on the rest.

I need like, 32 lanes. Not 64 in a Threadripper. Not 128828182 or whatever comes on a brand new $10,000k EPYC, I need 32, and don't waste em on a bunch fo flaky USB crap I can't use. Don't give me a fucking oculink port. I want to use the slots. That i have. In my computer. That I can screw the card into securely and power without an additional power supply. I can't be the only one.

It doesn't help that nics usually are not available in narrow pcie cards. PCIe 5 x1 is 32 Gbps (afaik) so it should be able to handle 25GbE, but good luck finding such nic. Either you get some 400GbE pcie5 monster or some ancient pcie3 25gbe card

Got an N150 running elementary as a basic plex server and I couldn’t be happier. About to shift it to Jellyfin this winter just need to find time and do it lol

I picked up a no name brand N100 for like $150, came with a (pirated key at this price point?) Win 11 pro license and am blown away at how capable it is. Could easily be a desktop machine for web browsing and office work. Would undoubtedly struggle with heavy electron apps, but really impressive. I even tried to run a few games on it, and it still handled everything surprisingly well.

It makes me look at my way over specced workstation (for significantly more than $150) wondering why I am burning so much electricity daily. Should use a micro desktop for the web and just remote into my beefy workstation as required.

I daily'd an n100 box for a year for browsing, admin and light media. Had a second running Plex headless.

Using stripped down versions of win iot, they were fantastic.

The oem keys are legit fyi.

I looked briefly at one PC like that. 15w of power looks great but from other hand 2 nvme disk 6tb Max total does not looks that great anymore. You have to have some other PC or Nas for backup at the least.

Depends on the purpose. Maybe not the best for very big NAS with 10G ethernet requirement but suitable for many other purposes. Maybe you don't need that much space or maybe you are just running git server.

What on earth do you need more than 6tb internal storage for!? It has ports aplenty and external storage is cheap cheap cheap these days. Mine streams 4K media via externals without breaking a sweat

it's right there in the first section:

   highlighting notable advancements in ARM-based Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) and their increasing competitiveness against traditional x86 platforms.

Not discussing x86 doesn't highlight their competitiveness. It might be a useful article for some, but for most of us the N100 is a better option overall for everything we might look at a SoC for. YMMV of course, I haven't seen a N100 SoC (I've also never looked), but complete N100 systems that are ready to work are similar prices to an ARM SoC after you buy the non-optional extras like case, disk, and power supply.

It also misses the other end - many things people think of SoC for could be done with a ESP32 or other micro controller for less cost, and this might be a better option.

I'm not completely faulting them, you have to set limits someplace. However the limits they have make this summary less useful for most people who will read it.

the AMD and intel mini PCs are a fabulous value and the best solution for hobbyist / homelab

Nothing about NXP? They are a pretty big player in this space, and mostly do a great job contributing upstream to the kernel, but I guess they don't have a hobby-level entry point readily available.

I've used NXP-based embedded Linux hardware from Toradex, Gateworks and EmbeddedTS in previous projects, lots of vendors out there.

https://www.toradex.com/

https://www.gateworks.com/

https://www.embeddedts.com/

https://variscite.com/

https://www.ibase.com.tw/en

https://www.phytec.com/

https://www.ezurio.com/

Lovely snapshot in time view of the small computers that drive a ton of product innovation.

One major gap I'd really like to see covered better is power consumption. We've started seeing unboxing and reviews for the Arduino Uno Q for example, but no one seems to be breaking out a simple USB power meter to get some idea how much power it takes, headless or sitting at desktop.

Pretty nice that so many chips have pretty good Linux support.

I have some (somewhat older) OrangePis here that came with a board covering heatsink with an integrated fan because it turns out they really need it. The things get hot to the touch when working hard. I don't have any power measurement hooked up to them, but they have to be drawing a fair bit of juice to warm up that much.

In this format I go deep down the Mailing lists, news articles and more to summarise what exciting hardware has been published and software has been merged into Linux. Also breaking down rumours and developer conferences about future SoC‘s. Hope you all find it useful!

If you could mirror your feed on Bluesky, that would be appreciated. Some of us will not use X.

Mastodon or bust!

https://mastodon.social/@sbcwiki

Awesome, thanks!

Can you include more prices? It would give me an idea of the cost even if it is in USD. What i found most annoying about my latest search is that it is hard to find something not named raspberry or Arduino for a reasonable price. I was looking for a simple gigabit board with usb 3 to attach a removable drive to. The only one i found was raspberry pi orange 3B . Nobody else seemed to have gigabit nic with usb 3.

The Raspberry PI also has an intangible value from years of community goodwill. And people trust that the kernel OS support will be around in 10 years.

The NVIDIA solution is impressive... but self-immolated with the consumer price point (markets for government equipment may work.) People usually either have money or time... asking for both in a product is foolish.

The other SoM also have a long-tail market attention problem, as one could spend 2 weeks tracking unstable kernel driver problems. Or just drop in a $35 pi, and solve the task at hand. =3

Does a Banana Pi BPi-M5 fit your specs? The banana pis have pretty good networking options.

Why would you expect USB3 and Ethernet, fast and relatively expensive interfaces, to be attached to a cheap low-spec MCU?

Did you consider a ready-made USB3 extender over Ethernet? There is a reason they cost so much ;-/

Rockchip SoCs starting with the RK3399 can do both USB3 and Ethernet.

The only board that I own that does both at the same time is the Pine64 Quartz64 that uses the RK3566. My Pinebook Pro doesn't have an ethernet port, Orange Pi 5 Max has ethernet but doesn't use the builtin controller to provide it.

I use NetBSD on a Pine64 RockPro64 and use USB3. It has been stable:

    awge0: flags=0x8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
            ec_capabilities=0x1<VLAN_MTU>
            ec_enabled=0x1<VLAN_MTU>
            address: 26:80:xx:xx:xx:xx
            media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT full-duplex)

i see Quartz64 with 4GiB of RAM offered for $60. Sounds pretty reasonable for an SBC of this caliber. I mostly mean that something like the original RPi would be underpowered for USB3.0 and 1GbE, to say nothing of smaller devices like a $15 ESP32.

Pi4 does two USB 3.0 ports, but you are right in that USB 3.1 is a little much for a SoM.

Its a nice little SoM, in some ways it was better than the pi5 for hardware media encoding. =3

This could be improved a lot IMHO.

NXP's IMX6/8 family is dominant in the market, really should have presence there.

And TI's ARM series, still popular in beagleboard family and used widely in the field.

And Intel's N100/N150, though I'm unsure if they're still "SBC" boards.

Allwinner, ESP32 are also major players from China.

Now apparently Qualcomm is entering the fight with new chips on Arduino UNO Q.

NXP and TI are both open source friendly, unlike broadcom. My first choice will be NXP.

Never heard about CIX.

Thanks for covering the software support side of things; that's always been the worst part of the ecosystem, and annoyingly hard to get info on.

On which note: Oh, wow, the Radxa Dragon Q6A looks great! Mainline support, good hardware, good price. Once it's back in stock I may have to buy one:)

> Radxa Dragon Q6A looks great

Indeed. With 16GB RAM, NVME, integrated GPU, 1Gbps ethernet and Wi-Fi, it's basically the mean 2017-2018 laptop. External Wi-Fi antenna connectors (plural) is eye opening. Too bad it's Quectel AIC8800.

Title critique:

RaspberryPi is not an SoC vendor. They take proprietary SOCs from Broadcom, use proprietary firmware and build a product around it. They obviously upstream what they can, but they fundamentally are a system integrator, not an SoC vendor.

Not to disagree with your critique but just to note that they are a microcontroller vendor with the RP2040 and RP2350.

I do wonder if there is a long term wish to break their dependency on Broadcom but I suspect creating an SoC for the main Pi series is probably in the 'too difficult' category.

Yup, I really like their microcontrollers (which quite frankly nowadays what's the difference between an SOC and some of these more capable MCUs), but my comment was specifically relating to their "Linux" capable boards.

You might like the AMP hour podcast that had the team behind the RP2350 on. Lots of interesting stuff on what was involved in making it. One of my favourite podcast episodes this year.

https://theamphour.com/687-the-rp2350-with-the-raspberry-pi-...

Pis use Broadcom SoCs, not Qualcomm.

Yes, thank you for the correction.

This misses the NVIDIA Jetson/Orin/Thor line of GPU-enabled edge computers which are more comparable with Raspberry Pis. The Jetson Orin Nano Super is $250. Another feature which we find useful is the native NVMe drive support. For the price, this blows RPis out of the water for imaging applications.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-sy...

This looks very thin and Linux focused to be the "state of embedded".

I would expect such title to encompass more hardware architectures and the plethora of embedded OSes available in the industry.

You're right, but it seems to me that Linux has slowly been eating this field. I personally didn't work a lot on Linux platforms, but they seem to be everywhere.

QNX, NuttX, FreeRTOS, Arduino, IDF, vxWorks, sel4, Zephyr, INTEGRITY, μ-velOSity , microEJ, and probably much others I don't have on my radar.

First of all thank you everybody for reading and commenting! I want to address some of the comments I got regarding the article:

- xyz vendor is not covered: For this there is a simple answer, I don't have the hardware so I can't make a fair judgement when reporting about it. I don't want to be another reporter of basic benchmark scores & 1080P Youtube playback but actually show off the hardware capabilties with the right software. Hopefully this will be possible with more in the future as this project grows

- This is only one sector of the space why don't you have micro controllers or x86: While I want to cover all aspects of the space I am not an embedded engineer. I started during covid with the goal to replace my X86 homelab server with an ARM one to save power and got deeper into the rabbit hole until I ended up maintaining some boards and doing some Debian/Ubuntu based bring ups in my freetime. This led to me wanting to have one place to share my findings along the way and document things that might leave one stranded in the world of Yocto/U-Boot/Linux Kernel/Device-Trees/etc. and I created sbcwiki.com, not only for me to share my findings but for others to contribute with simple markdown files to the GitHub repo too.

The biggest problem for me with Raspberry Pi alternatives is the Linux support. Given the fact that getting mainline support is hard & long, I like the approach RPi has taken, to fork the kernel, add support for most parts of the SoC, upstream it and rebase the fork regularly. And I can still use my RPi model B with the latest OS they release. For example, I bought RK3588-based board and the officially supported kernel version is 6.1. I know that Collabora and other people are working hard to have upstream support [1], but it will take time until all IPs are covered. Is there any alternative that has Linux support comparable to Raspberry Pi?

[1] https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35...

Since they're all RPI alternatives anyway and you don't get the ecosystem benefits, you should try an Intel N100. I switched my personal services over to one of those a couple years ago, and it's a great bang-for-your-buck small server. Being an Intel chip, stock Ubuntu just works. I've had no compatibility issues.

N100 indeed looks like a good alternative. I own one N100-based mini PC and I see there are some N100-based SBC as well. x86-like support for ARM/RISC-V SoC would be a miracle ;-).

Yeah, I love it. Losing access to the RPI ecosystem addons kind of sucks, but I found I don't really use them anyway. I think you can get a USB GPIO if you really need that, but personally I've moved more towards N100 for services, ESP32 for devices.

I have dabbled in model edge processing like Efficientnet and YOLO on Hailo platform.

Raspberry Pi and its AI HAT+ seems to be the most accessible, often others can easily pick it up the basics and get up and running without much trouble even without experience.

I wonder if there is any alternative? Raspberry Pi 5 + the 26 TOPS HAT+ is not cheap.

What Raspberry Pi is to Broadcom (developer-friendly SBCs), Beagleboard is to TI.

It's a slightly different approach -- Beagleboard is a non-profit and emphasizes openly purchasable components. But similar in that it is the cheapest way to tinker with SoCs from that vendor.

BeagleY-AI has 4 TOPS for ~$70. AI inference tooling is still improving but I've been working on it here: https://docs.beagleboard.org/boards/beagley/ai/demos/using-e...

> I wonder if there is any alternative? Raspberry Pi 5 + the 26 TOPS HAT+ is not cheap.

Combined they're like $250? Not expensive.

On the other hand, at that price maybe you ought to get a Jetson Orin Nano.

Does any SBC offer SFP+ or SFP28?

I don't see any option to sort by network speed or network chip

The solidrun LX2 offers 4x SFP+, but that board is getting quite old at this point.

There are a couple of bananapi router boards that have 1 maybe 2 SFP+

The ones that do have pcie are generally one lane of gen 3. some n100 boards might have enough of you stick storage on data

I'm not sure that the RK3688 and a big chunk of the article spent on its specs belongs in a "State of Embedded: Q4 2025 Overview" given that it's due sometime in 2026. I'm sure it's going to be great but I suggest it belongs to a future state.

On the other hand, CIX have been putting actual Arm v9 hardware in developers' hands for some time.

I am working with Rockchip rv1106 which has 1 TOPS NPU but also some cool DSP features which has helped me do very interesting things.

For my project I am making a SLAM/VIO using it, see video: https://x.com/_asadmemon/status/1977737626951041225

Surprisingly no mention of ESP soc’s. Mane esp boards easily replace both arduino and raspberry pi zero projects with a single board.

Which ESP chips run Linux?

A lot of the chips have started including NPUs. How are applications supposed to access that acceleration now with embedded Linux? Does linux handle this for you, or do you need to leverage some specific drivers like CUDA?

Ideally things are going to adapt the Mesa Teflon framework. See here: https://docs.mesa3d.org/teflon.html

Available for NXP IMX8M, Amlogic A311D and RK3588

vendor-specific drivers are the norm. Usually on an obsolete kernel version which never gets updated.

Anything new happening on the risc-v side of things? Last I heard there were some micro-itx boards at around rpi4 speed but haven’t heard much since.

RISC-V eats the low-end microcontrollers range alive at the moment with a lot of interesting features (integrated PHYs, etc.) coming from the vendors.

The dragon one sounds interesting. mainline support, cheap price point and npu/gpu would be great

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