Sipeed has announced the MaixStation, a mini PC built around Axera's new AX8860P chip. It comes with 128GB of LPDDR5X on a 256-bit bus, delivering 273 GB/s of memory bandwidth — the same class as Nvidia's DGX Spark and AMD's Ryzen AI Halo. Sipeed expects the 128GB model to cost around $3,999, which would undercut the DGX Spark's $6,950 price and match AMD's 128GB Ryzen AI Halo model.
The AX8860P pairs 16 Arm Cortex-A55 cores with an in-house NPU rated at 256 TOPS at FP4 without sparsity, built on a 6nm process. The MaixStation ships with Debian 13 and Linux 6.18, and Sipeed claims support for vLLM, SGLang, and PyTorch, with Axera adding ONNX, Hugging Face formats, and an OpenAI-compatible API. The NPU toolchain is due by the end of this month, and a Kickstarter campaign is planned for the end of the year, with units shipping within three months after it closes.
Performance claims should be treated cautiously. Sipeed initially said the MaixStation had 25% faster prefill and 30% faster decode than the DGX Spark when running Qwen 27B, but later clarified that its official comparison puts it about 10% ahead on both metrics, with FP4 on each machine and speculative decoding off. The company said newer runs with a wider lead are not official yet.
The MaixStation is notable because it uses Chinese silicon rather than AMD or Nvidia hardware, which is what most existing Chinese mini PCs in this category rely on. It also takes a standard M.2 2280 SSD, unlike the DGX Spark's less common 2242 form factor. No independent benchmarks have been published, and the software stack is still in development, so the real-world performance and compatibility remain to be seen.