The Sipeed MaixStation mini-PC features the Axera AX8860P chip, which includes a 16-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor and an NPU delivering 256 TOPS in FP4 format. The system is equipped with 128 GB of LPDDR5X memory on a 256-bit bus, offering 273 GB/s bandwidth. The device is manufactured using a 6-nm process.
The crowdfunding campaign for the device is scheduled to launch on Kickstarter at the end of the year, with an expected price starting at $3999. Deliveries are set to begin three months after the campaign concludes. Software tools for the AI accelerator are expected to be released by the end of November.
In performance tests with the Qwen 3.8-27B model, the Sipeed system demonstrated a 25% faster request preprocessing and 30% faster response generation compared to the Nvidia DGX Spark. The hardware includes an M.2 2280 slot for SSDs and supports PCIe 5.0, with a power consumption of 40 W under typical loads.
The platform supports Debian 13 and Linux kernel 6.18, with compatibility for vLLM, SGLang, PyTorch, ONNX, and OpenAI-compatible APIs. Sipeed plans to release the AXDSL programming language and Pulsar2 source code by the end of October. Future support for Windows 11 remains dependent on market demand.
The compact 11x11x3 cm unit allows for multi-node configurations, supporting up to eight nodes via a C2C connection with 256–384 Gbit/s bandwidth. Users can scale performance to 512 or 1024 TOPS using two- or four-chip setups, with an 80% scaling efficiency.
