Canonical has shared a new Ubuntu Concept image for the CIX P1, an Armv9 SoC powering single-board computers like the Radxa Orion O6 and Orange Pi 6 Plus.
The image is based on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and ships with a Linux 7.0 kernel from CIX’s open-source GitHub tree using only open-source drivers. A set of patches sits on top of the mainline kernel, but the goal is for them to be upstreamed too.
Canonical is using the same approach it took with its Snapdragon builds by letting the hardware describe itself to the OS at boot (ACPI) rather than per-device configuration (Device Tree). This nets one image that aims to work reliably on all supported CIX P1 devices.
The CIX P1 comprises of a 12-core Armv9 SoC built on TSMC’s 6nm process, combining Cortex-A720 and Cortex-A520 core with Arm Immortalis G720 10-core GPU (with hardware ray-tracing support) and a 30 TOPS neural processing unit (45 TOPS total with CPU + GPU).
Ubuntu 26.04 up and running (original image: Tobias Heider)
What’s the CIX P1 Performance like compared to other SBCs?
I’ve no first-hand experience to say, but it appears to punch above its price-point in its class. It matches the Intel N100 in single-core performance and beats it in multi-core (on account of having more cores). It smokes the Raspberry Pi 5 because… Most things do.
But performance is comparative here; this is not intended to be a full-time desktop PC for gaming and creative workloads, so its power is comparative to its use-cases1.
Ubuntu CIX P1 image is experimental (and not an official LTS release) and comes with no official support or guarantees – which is the point: it’s provided to get people testing at the edges of what’s new and providing feedback and suggestions.
Canonical’s Tobias Heider says the image has been tested on the Radxa Orion O6, Radxa Orion O6N, Orange Pi 6 Plus, Minisform MS-R1 and the MetaComputing AI PC.
The ISO is available to download from the Ubuntu Concept image server (it’s near the bottom of the list if sorted alphabetically). The ISO is ~4GB.
Bugs should be filed against the Ubuntu Concept project on Launchpad, with [CIX] written in the bug title and the hardware/device/SBC the bug appeared on mentioned (it helps narrow things down).
- Yes, you can buy a faster second-hand ThinkPad for less. You cannot stuff it in a yoghurt pot, run it off a USB-C cable and ask it to drive four 4K monitors whilst doing on-device inference. ↩︎
Instagram Engineering
Shopify Engineering