Honor Tiangong AXB35: a petaflop of AI in a 2-liter box
Honor is pitching a desktop AI workstation small enough to slide behind a monitor — and the specs suggest it's aimed squarely at developers who want local inference without a cloud bill. The Tiangong AXB35 Ultra fits Nvidia's RTX Spark platform (Blackwell GPU paired with a Grace Arm-based CPU) into a 2-liter, 1.5kg chassis. No price or release date has been announced.
The hardware
The AXB35 Ultra's headline number is 128GB of LPDDR5X unified memory — the same pool shared by the CPU and GPU. Honor says that's enough to run large language models (LLMs) up to 300 billion parameters locally, though the company qualifies that claim with caveats around quantization level, context window size, and concurrent workload count. Peak compute reaches 1 petaflop in FP4 (low-precision AI math), which matches what Nvidia advertises for the RTX Spark platform broadly.
Storage starts at 2TB SSD, with three M.2 slots for expansion. Power draw is selectable at 55W, 85W, or 132W via an external 240W brick — useful if you want to balance performance against noise or heat.
Two more configs
Honor also announced two lower-tier models. The AXB35 Pro uses an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (the "Strix Halo" chip seen in Framework and Corsair machines) with 128GB RAM and a 1TB SSD, rated at up to 126 TOPS of AI performance. The AXB35 Standard drops to an Intel Core Ultra X7 358H with 64GB RAM and a 512GB SSD, but actually leads on NPU throughput at 180 TOPS.
All three share the same 2-liter chassis and connectivity suite: dual 10GbE Ethernet ports, Wi-Fi 7, two USB4, four USB-A, HDMI 2.1, and DisplayPort 1.4. Windows 11 and Ubuntu are both supported — the Ubuntu option matters for developers who need a full Linux environment for testing AI models locally.
The catch
No pricing has been disclosed. Honor's Tiangong site currently directs interested buyers to a contact-for-configuration form, which points toward a B2B sales model rather than retail. That's a notable contrast with NVIDIA's own DGX Spark, which starts at $3,999 and is sold through standard channels. Competing machines from ASUS, Dell, and Lenovo on the same RTX Spark platform are already appearing in the market.
Until Honor confirms a distributor, a price, and a launch window for the US and UK, the AXB35 sits in the category of compelling-on-paper hardware that may not reach general consumers anytime soon. Per VideoCardz, no retail pre-orders are live as of now.
