The robot that won the 400 m comes in three versions — and two of them have a computer weaker than a phone

Beijing's state-backed humanoid centre published the full spec card for Tiangong Omni on 21 August, four days before the machine took the 400 m small-class title at the World Humanoid Robot Games. The card answers a question the launch coverage did not: Omni is not one robot but three, and the difference between them is almost entirely the computer. All three stand 135 cm. The flagship weighs 39.5 kg, has 31 degrees of freedom and carries a Thor T5000 module rated at 2070 TFLOPS — the same class of compute the centre puts in its full-size flagship, Tiangong 3.0. The standard version drops to 37 kg and 25 degrees of freedom, the basic to 35 kg and 23. Both of the cheaper versions run an eight-core CPU with 8 GB of memory. That is a specification a mid-range phone would recognise, and it sets a hard ceiling on what can run on board. The centre is candid about what that ceiling means. The flagship is described as the version for teams deploying large models, with on-device VLA and world-model inference, dexterous hands, VR teleoperation and isomorphic arms. The standard version is sold for autonomous guided tours, stage performance and classroom interaction. The basic version is for teleoperated demonstrations inside a defined area — that is, a body someone else drives. This is the part of the open-platform pitch that deserves attention. Omni's openness is real and unusually concrete: joint, sensor, system and motion-control APIs are all exposed, and the centre ships a 500-hour dynamics-filtered motion dataset with it, stating plainly that it is not handing developers an SDK but the machine's own interfaces. What is being opened, though, is the body. Locomotion is shared across the range — 2 m/s unladen, 1 m/s under load, the same depth camera, LiDAR and IMU — while the ability to think on board is the thing you pay extra for. Which makes the medal a slightly different result than it looked. A 400 m final on a flat indoor track is a locomotion problem, and locomotion is the part every Omni has. The interesting question for the buyers this platform is aimed at is not how fast the champion ran, but how much of the champion's brain comes in the box they can afford.