ARM developers are very familiar with a certain kind of anger. You fight with a custom board support package, look for kernel patches, and talk to bootloaders that seem set up to be difficult for hours or even days. The hardware might be able to do it. Getting it to do something useful is a whole different story. This was thought of when the SolidRun HoneyComb LX2K was made.
The NXP LX2160A is a 16-core ARM Cortex-A72 processor that runs at 2GHz and powers the Mini-ITX board. The DDR4 memory can be up to 64GB and works in two channels. When it comes to networking, things really get interesting. There are four 10Gbps SFP+ fiber ports and one standard GbE port, which makes this feel less like a home project and more like something from a data center rack. Given the price, it’s hard to argue with the specs.
The hardware isn’t the only thing that sets the LX2K apart from other ARM single-board computers. Together, SolidRun, NXP, and Arm were able to get SystemReady ES certification. This is a standard that means the board’s firmware can actually boot common operating systems without needing a custom BSP. It may not seem important. It’s not small at all for people who have spent three nights fighting an embedded Linux build just to get a blinking cursor. It seems like the business world is finally realizing that developers deserve better.
Because it is based on Tianocore EDK2, the firmware lets you install Ubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD, and even try VMware ESXi and Windows 10 Enterprise on Arm. That change in philosophy is more important than any single specification. The board is meant to work more like a regular PC than an embedded platform.
When you use the LX2K in real life, though, you see that the “it just works” promise isn’t quite true. One developer who pre-ordered the board wrote about how to get Arch Linux to run on it. The process included Docker builds, SSHFS mistakes, bootloader math that didn’t make sense, and several days of trial and error before the system finally booted from NVMe. The uboot process for writing OS images to storage is written down, but the parameters that control it aren’t well explained. It seems like the platform is easier to use than the ones that came before it, but it still requires more of you than a regular laptop.
Benchmarks show that the NXP LX2160A processor is on par with or even faster than AMD’s Ryzen 5 2400G, a consumer CPU that cost about $150 at the time of the comparison. The LX2K board cost $750, which seems like a lot until you realize that a separate 10G fiber NIC with the same features costs more than $300. When you separate the value calculation, it starts to look different.
That being said, SolidRun also has a 1U dual-sled server configuration that can fit two HoneyComb LX2K units into a single rack unit. This is designed for native ARM build server farms. This design works well for teams that do Aarch64 native compilation or continuous integration on a large scale, as it reduces the amount of space needed on the rack without sacrificing functionality.
It’s interesting that the HoneyComb LX2K is neither a consumer product nor an enterprise piece of hardware, but it is actually a useful thing in the middle. It’s clear that the ARM server ecosystem is getting bigger, and boards like this one help make that happen. It’s still not clear if it will become standard in development labs or just a niche favorite among fans who are willing to read the documentation carefully. It’s a step in the right direction, though, that the hardware was made by developers for developers.
