// TOM'S HARDWARE US — HARDWARE & GADGET
Sipeed reveals Chinese-made DGX Spark and Ryzen AI Halo rival, expected to cost $3,999
Its NPU toolchain is due at month’s end, with units shipping after a year-end Kickstarter.
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A Chinese rival to the DGX Spark and the Ryzen AI Halo, at least on paper, has emerged with Sipeed’s announcement of the MaixStation. The system, built on Axera’s new AX8860P, is in the same memory class with 128GB of LPDDR5X on a 256-bit bus at 273 GB/s. Sipeed told Tom’s Hardware Premium it expects the 128GB model to cost around $3,999, with launch discounts on Kickstarter, putting it level with the 128GB Ryzen AI Halo and well under the DGX Spark’s current MSRP of $6,950. Sign-ups are open now on Sipeed’s MaixStation page ahead of a Kickstarter campaign at the end of the year, with units shipping within three months after it closes. The NPU toolchain is due by the end of this month.
Coming today! Beat DGX Spark!
MaixStation soon～ https://t.co/e7DvWweVntOctober 13, 2026
The AX8860P is a 16-core Arm Cortex-A55 part with an in-house NPU rated at 256 TOPS at native FP4 with no sparsity. The chip is produced in the 6nm process, Axera says. Sipeed claims the system has 25% faster prefill and 30% faster decode than the DGX Spark when running Qwen 27B (the company did not disclose which specific model, but later details that it expects a single MaixStation to run Qwen 3.8-27B) from a single node.
In its email, though, the company put its MaixStation about 10% ahead on both prefill and decode when compared to DGX Spark, with FP4 on each machine, with speculative decoding off, and said newer runs with a wider lead aren’t official yet. It teased the new product on its X account, showing a photo from the AX8860P’s announcement at an industrial fair in Shanghai on Tuesday.
Kickstarter at the end of 2026; specs are Sipeed’s claims
Blackwell GPU: up to 1 PFLOP FP4 with sparsity, about 500 TFLOPS dense
Radeon 8065S GPU (40 CUs): up to 61 TFLOPS FP16; NPU: up to 55 TOPS
Debian 13; NPU toolchain due at the end of October; Sipeed claims vLLM, SGLang and PyTorch support