The DragonBox store is taking pre-orders for a small form-factor PC from Tianjin Phytium Technology that combines an eight-core Arm v8 processor with AMD Radeon RX 550 graphics, as reported by Liliputing.
The slim, black case has relatively few ports to break its monolithic sides, featuring HDMI 2.0b, gigabit Ethernet, a lone USB 3.0 and five USB 2.0 ports, plus a couple of audio jacks. Inside, you’ll find 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD in an M.2 slot (2280). This, along with the GPU (which sits in a PCIe x8 slot and is provided with 2GB of VRAM), should be user-upgradable.
The CPU is the Phytium D2000, a derivative of the FeiTeng-2000/4 CPU. The Phytium D2000 is based upon a 14nm chip with 8MP L2 cache, 4MB L3 cache, and support for DDR4-3200 memory and 34 PCIe 3.0 lanes. There's no mention of a clock speed, but as we’ve reported in the past it could be in the 2.3 - 2.6 GHz range. TDP is around 25W.
The recommended OS is Ubuntu Kylin, the official Chinese version of Ubuntu, but with the ability to boot from USB other Linux distros should be viable. OpenSUSE and Debian can be installed without issue, according to Dragonbox. A USB to Ethernet adapter is included as the built-in Qualcomm AR 8035 network card doesn’t work well with all Linux distributions.
Interestingly, two percent of the price of each unit sold goes to the developer of Box86/Box64.
There is a slight catch, however. Dragonbox is gauging interest in the PC, so requires 'enough' orders to be placed before December 10th to make it worth shipping. If the threshold, which is not disclosed, isn't met, customers will get their money back.
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Ian Evenden is a UK-based news writer for Tom’s Hardware US. He’ll write about anything, but stories about Raspberry Pi and DIY robots seem to find their way to him.
