$699 for a Mini, $599 for this. The 32GB ram may be nice, but I haven't felt ram pressure on my M1 16GB even running Windows VM on Parallels once, with VSCode, Teams, ~20 tabs of Firefox, DBeaver, Outlook, and Kitty open at once.

Would like to see perf numbers. Could be an interesting box, maybe a nice home server.

that 699 mini also has a lot smaller ssd which is pretty important.

Where does it say Linux is officially supported?

The chip is having mainline Linux support merged with 5.20, according to Phoronix: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.20-SoCs-8cx-Gen3-Arm

I'd wait to hear if this board has Linux support. It might have a locked bootloader.

Specs seem to list UEFI Secure Boot, which has been unlockable on all of Microsoft's Surface devices and previous ARM outings. Shipping this with a locked bootloader would be one hell of a breach from tradition (and probably undermine it's usefulness as a dev box anyways).

Regardless, the internal SOC is the same as the new ARM Thinkpad which also shipped with an unlocked bootloader. Pretty much everything suggests that this will ship unlocked.

> Specs seem to list UEFI Secure Boot, which has been unlockable on all of Microsoft's Surface devices and previous ARM outings

That doesn't quite seem accurate.

For one example: https://www.theregister.com/2016/07/15/windows_fix_closes_rt...

For all ARM64 Windows devices, UEFI Secure Boot is end-user configurable. And yes that includes Surface Pro X, Pro 9 arm and this devkit.

Sure, doesn't mean that everything works though. The Thinkpad x13s has the same CPU and apparently is quite tricky to get booted. Once booted audio, sleep, bluetooth and the like has been problematic. Granted that's more of an issue with a laptop than a SFF like the DevKit.

Things do seem to be improving. Releasing the Thinkpad x13s has brought attention to the 8cx gen 3 from the Linux community.

I've tried it. It seems like even with a 6.0 Kernel, additional DTBs are required to boot.

https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1585562359254421504?s...

Yeah I am seriously considering getting one of these. 32gb of ram for 600 dollars plus its a decent specked arm machine with plenty of ports

> Qualcomm

The main reason so many Android devices are throwaway junk is Qualcomm. Don't rely on them for anything that you still want to keep running for more than a couple of years.

We used a Qualcomm module for wifi/bluetooth connectivity on an IoT device and the bluetooth just straight up didn't work for a handful of Android devices. We had to wait like a year for a mitigation, since it was closed source firmware. That was after like a 3 month process of actually find someone who would hear our issue.