First mini PC powered by the Tianjin Phytium D2000 ARMv8 Chinese CPU is available now for pre-order

Tianjin Phytium introduced the D2000 processor with ARMv8 cores for the Chinese market in early 2021, and, although we have not heard much about its performance in the meantime, it looks like the CPU is already available for Western PC builders, as Dragon Box from Germany includes it with a mini PC configuration.

The D2000 processor is produced on 14 nm nodes and features eight 64-bit ARMv8 cores. It also comes with 8 MB L2 cache + 4 MB L3 cache and supports up to 34 PCIe 3.0 lanes plus DDR4-3200 RAM. Now, the mini PC offered by Dragon Box is quite compact at 8.6 x 7.4 x 1.9 inches and integrates 16 GB of RAM along with a replaceable 512 GB M.2 2280 SSD. Since the processor itself does not come with integrated graphics, the mini PC is also equipped with a replaceable AMD Radeon RX 550 2 GB VRAM GPU connected to a PCIe 3.0 x8 slot. Port selection includes 3x USB 2.0, 3x USB-A 3.0, an HDMI 2.0b video output, audio and GbE jacks.

According to Dragon Box, such a configuration is suited for office, as well as for light gaming (runs Crysis!). The German company provides a Ubuntu Kylin distro by default, so users can run Intel and Windows apps through dedicated emulators like Box86/Box64 and WINE. Alternatively, one can install the ARM-based version of Windows. The mini PC builder notes that the Qualcomm AR 8035 Gigabit Ethernet card integrated on the board doesn't work well with all Linux distributions yet, therefore a separate USB Ethernet adapter is provided, as well.

This mini PC is pre-selling for 560 Euro (US$630) right now, and it will start shipping on December 17.

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