10 ms·

Orange Pi 5 Is a Great and Fast Alternative to the Raspberry Pi 4

133 points by LinuxBender 4y ago

djha-skin 4y ago
- Conveniently naming their chip "5" just to one up the pi 4. They're actually were four raspberry pi's; I'm not sure the orange can say the same thing - There's a notice in there that 'orange pi' is registered trademark of their company but clearly stealing the pi thing from raspberry - Finally they say that the pi is aging. I think they're missing the point of the raspberry pi. This just kind of feels like a cash grab. The pi came out with the noble purpose of educating children in the UK with a computer that was so simple and cheap all you needed to do was grab a keyboard and a TV and you could learn to program. They've accomplished so much more than what they started out to do. It's just insulting to see something like this. If I wanted more power I could just get a NUC. That said I have wanted to look into something like the pi but in a laptop form factor.
- noissruit 4y ago
  > - Conveniently naming their chip "5" just to one up the pi 4. They're actually were four raspberry pi's; I'm not sure the orange can say the same thing It'd have taken you two seconds to check that. No, it's not the first Orange Pi product. > The pi came out with the noble purpose of educating children in the UK with a computer that was so simple and cheap all you needed to do was grab a keyboard and a TV and you could learn to program. That's great and all but as a hobbyist who can't buy the Raspberry Pi in part because of production allotments to commercial integrations, it rings a little hollow.
- alxmdev 4y ago
  You're not wrong, these things are just future e-waste with short-term support, like another commenter mentioned.
  - sliken 4y ago
    There's quite a bit of activity getting the rk3588 working in the mainline kernel. People having current mainline kernel+patches working today, and getting those patches mainstreamed has been making steady progress. Some places to watch the activity if interested: https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-3588 https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-rockchip/list/ My nano Pi R6S (another SBC with RK3588) has dual 2.5GBE and 1GBE, is pretty fast, and has 8GB ram. I expect it to be useful for many years to come.
- sliken 4y ago
  Heh, or maybe: the orange zero orange pi plus 2e orange pi 3 lts orange pi 4 lts orange pi 5 In any case the rk3588 is available with 4x the PCIe, 2x the ram, 2-8x the performance, and ethernet and storage are over PCIe (not USB). Seems like a decent generational upgrade.
metadat 4y ago
Where can I buy a 32GB model? Amazon only has the 16GB available for pre-ordee.
- francisduvivier 4y ago
  32GB is not available for sale as far I and gizchina can find.
rektide 4y ago
I'm so glad to see something accessible from ARM that is vaguely performant & somewhat affordable. I bought one, pre-ordered it! Still untouched, still not running Debian, but delighted to see, excited to have this. Phones have sick incredible ARM cores but general availability of ARM chips is crazy shit, A72 (2015) or A73 processors have been the best one could hope for on a reasonable priced SBC, and the RK3588 here's A76 (2018) is vastly more modern, albeit still half a decade old. Still. This is not a fair comparison, but the used/refurb/old-stock PC market is just so ridiculously more capable. A HP EliteDesk G2 has i5-6500T (2015), 8GB ram, and 250GB SATA drive is $140 on amazon. It's a higher powered machine, 9W versus ~3W idle (shame on this review for having no power consumption figures at all), and much higher full-open power (I think my last kernel compile was <35W which is the TDP of the chip alone). And the OrangePi is significantly smaller form factor. There's cases where the OrangePi is a better fit. But for most general use, the x86 market has far far better value, does so much more, has so much more bandwidth (often 8x USB3.0 hosts, plus significant internal pcie). There's periodic articles on repurposing thin-client computer hardware. But again there's just such a mismatched value proposition. Not the same shakeout: they have hot, old, low-end chips, but sometimes very cheap on secondary markets. But there's typically much better mini-PCs with vastly more performance for not that much more, that will idle at least as well if not greatly better. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33791069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33791069 It's just so weird how few ARM chips are available. There had been a little more variety in who one could buy an SBC from. But now... Rockchip is the main company making purchaseable chips. Allwinner had some pretty fine offerings but has gotten sparse. MediaTek is doing excellent things in many spaces, but has almost no presence in accessible SBCs. There's tons of other chips but most of the market is invisible, is utterly uninterested in selling SBC type boards. There's a parallel x86 market, but Ryzen embedded systems tend to start at $400 for very sparse models. It's frustrating how deliberately unserved the low end is. That commodity x86 hardware dominates so savagely, by so many country-miles keeps feeling unfortunate. That ARM has such small niches it plays competitively in, and everywhere else it's broadly unavailable & unaffordable is a weird market dynamic, while these normally very expensive x86 cpus become available & affordable systems is such a strong & visible counter-trend. Also see: "Unpopular Opinion: Don't use an RPI for that" on these mini-PCs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35260322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35260322
ARandomerDude 4y ago
Upvoted this story so people who know more than will see it and comment. Don’t let me down, HN!
- wmf 4y ago
  It's the same price but 2x-3x faster. What more do you want to know?
theamk 4y ago
The hardware does not seem to be mainline supported, which means that you are at the mercy of a vendor. In other words, when they say "Ubuntu, Debian, Android, and Armbian" they don't actually mean you can run any future version of it, like you could for Raspberry Pi or x86 hardware. Instead, what they mean is: "We took a latest version of Debian/Ubuntu/Android/etc... and applied some patches to it to make it work on our board. But hey, it works today, and would maybe work next year too! And if you complain super hard we can fix some kernel bugs but no promises!" This lack of support is a big reason to stay away from less famous SBCs.. Sometimes all you want is to make a project and forget about it, and that maybe fine. But if you want something to base multiple projects on, keep to stuff with mainlined kernels.
- happymellon 4y ago
  It looks like they are working on getting the Rockchip RK3588 mainlined. CPU, PCI support is all there thanks to the QuartzPro64. At least with this one it looks like there are efforts rather than some of the other chipsets which don't have a chance.
  - francisduvivier 4y ago
    There is a crazy amount of SBC's coming out with the RK3588, so I aldo think the chances are pretty good for this one.
    - rektide 4y ago
      Do any Rockchip chips have good upstream? Number of boards is not at all what I'd look for. Plenty of terrible sbc get made. The track record of the chipmaker is the important thing, to me. It's not always clear cut. I think now there may be a more formal relationship, but Allwinner used to have good support from purely volunteer Bay Libre. I'm far from certain but part of me wants to believe that's in sizable part also Allwinner doing a less ship, less ultra-forked job in the first place when they dump their own ugly gross hacked out vendor tree fork, where-as many of these vendor trees are just wildly awful. Again, just to reiterate, I would never ever use board count as an indicator. Especially these days where there are only 2-4 (at best) chips available for use. Of course there's lots of sbc with this chip: the specs are great, the performance appears impressive, & there's literally no other chips to buy. That the vendor kernel is garbage & maybe there are oodles of little design bugs is like, not a big impediment to releasing hardware. Alas.
PostOnce 4y ago
Every time somebody tells me something is a great alternative to a raspberry pi, it doesn't work or idles at 90c or comes unsoldered quickly or is missing critical software or all kinds of nonsense that makes it not a close alternative, especially not at a near price point. I'm willing to try stuff, but I'm skeptical of every new board because of previous bad experiences.
- sliken 4y ago
  I've had similar issues, but bought a NanoPi R6S with 8GB ram. Got ubuntu 22.04 going on the first day, and it's a nice little server. It's crazy faster than a Pi4, stable, and runs cool. I paid for the $20 CNC machines case with passive cooling. Under normal use it's quite cool to the touch, and plan to make it into a small home router after I'm done tinkering with it.
- francisduvivier 4y ago
  I have this board, you better add some cooling but I had no issue setting up docker containers with node red, prometheus, grafana, Emby and Home assistant. Too bad I currently can't succeed in using a raspberry pi camera on it.
gropo 4y ago
i have a handful of these and 4 core rpi goes faster than 6 core orange for many things.
- rektide 4y ago
  like what? the benchmarks here make that seem vastly vastly unlikely. please, put up. make claims that are at least contestable.
  - francisduvivier 4y ago
    also wondering about this
    - gropo 4y ago
      is there some sort of bench you want to see the output of? ill try to reproduce/document for you.
      - gropo 4y ago
        okay, for example, the pi400 beats out the orangepi4 lts and orangepi 4b in the time it takes to make a sha256sum of a file
        gropo 4y ago
        [flagged]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
russnes 4y ago
Also the RockPi 4 is pretty cool, with a full fledged m.2 socket and stronger GPU. It has mainline support although I had to chroot install void linux since there was no official image
francisduvivier 4y ago
Note that they just released the 5B version, which loses the M.2 slot buy gains emmc storage and wifi 6! I have the original 5 board running for some weeks now with some docker containers and it's running great.
istobic 4y ago
Orange Pi (Xunlong) has a record about not caring at all about up streaming their products. Mentioning the OPI 5 as an alternative to RPI4 is very abstruse.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  especially rich coming from phoronix which is a Linux focused publication. they should know better.
- pmontra 4y ago
  At least I could buy an OPI 5. RPI4 is basically RIP, let me pun about it. Who cares if it is mainlined if there is no way to buy it at all or at a reasonable price.
- CyberDildonics 4y ago
  Abstruse means obscure, I think you meant obtuse, which means annoyingly insensitive.
ekianjo 4y ago
Except that as usual its not on mainline so it becomes disposable junk once someone decides to drop support for it
snvzz 4y ago
Today, I am only looking forward, with RISC-V architecture. ARM SBCs are the past. I love my VisionFive 2. It is no Orange Pi 5, but it is fast enough, and it is RISC-V proper.
- mihaaly 4y ago
  > ARM SBCs are the past. Interesting statement. Care to elaborate?
  - jimbomins 4y ago
    I've my doubts about Arm's future with the reports of intending to up the price of licensing. That strategy seems insane with the Risc-v progress and increased uptake by big tech companies.
    - snvzz 4y ago
      It'll be a spike in income, which will look good for IPO purposes. Then a sharp drop to nothing, as everybody has moved on to RISC-V. But by then the company will be long sold to suckers through IPO. So it doesn't matter.
xony 4y ago
[dead]
FpUser 4y ago
Well thank you but I've got burned enough with Raspberry Pi and Orange prices are still high. I've got better way to waste my money.
giuliomagnifico 4y ago
Hardware talking surely, but the software? I’m always feared about the support of some software when using RPi clones.
jimbomins 4y ago
£320 on Amazon does not seem to fall into affordable to me compared to a RPi 4

133 points by LinuxBender 4y ago

- Conveniently naming their chip "5" just to one up the pi 4. They're actually were four raspberry pi's; I'm not sure the orange can say the same thing - There's a notice in there that 'orange pi' is registered trademark of their company but clearly stealing the pi thing from raspberry - Finally they say that the pi is aging. I think they're missing the point of the raspberry pi. This just kind of feels like a cash grab. The pi came out with the noble purpose of educating children in the UK with a computer that was so simple and cheap all you needed to do was grab a keyboard and a TV and you could learn to program. They've accomplished so much more than what they started out to do. It's just insulting to see something like this. If I wanted more power I could just get a NUC. That said I have wanted to look into something like the pi but in a laptop form factor.

noissruit 4y ago
> - Conveniently naming their chip "5" just to one up the pi 4. They're actually were four raspberry pi's; I'm not sure the orange can say the same thing It'd have taken you two seconds to check that. No, it's not the first Orange Pi product. > The pi came out with the noble purpose of educating children in the UK with a computer that was so simple and cheap all you needed to do was grab a keyboard and a TV and you could learn to program. That's great and all but as a hobbyist who can't buy the Raspberry Pi in part because of production allotments to commercial integrations, it rings a little hollow.
alxmdev 4y ago
You're not wrong, these things are just future e-waste with short-term support, like another commenter mentioned.
- sliken 4y ago
  There's quite a bit of activity getting the rk3588 working in the mainline kernel. People having current mainline kernel+patches working today, and getting those patches mainstreamed has been making steady progress. Some places to watch the activity if interested: https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-3588 https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-rockchip/list/ My nano Pi R6S (another SBC with RK3588) has dual 2.5GBE and 1GBE, is pretty fast, and has 8GB ram. I expect it to be useful for many years to come.
sliken 4y ago
Heh, or maybe: the orange zero orange pi plus 2e orange pi 3 lts orange pi 4 lts orange pi 5 In any case the rk3588 is available with 4x the PCIe, 2x the ram, 2-8x the performance, and ethernet and storage are over PCIe (not USB). Seems like a decent generational upgrade.

metadat 4y ago

Where can I buy a 32GB model? Amazon only has the 16GB available for pre-ordee.

francisduvivier 4y ago
32GB is not available for sale as far I and gizchina can find.

rektide 4y ago

I'm so glad to see something accessible from ARM that is vaguely performant & somewhat affordable. I bought one, pre-ordered it! Still untouched, still not running Debian, but delighted to see, excited to have this. Phones have sick incredible ARM cores but general availability of ARM chips is crazy shit, A72 (2015) or A73 processors have been the best one could hope for on a reasonable priced SBC, and the RK3588 here's A76 (2018) is vastly more modern, albeit still half a decade old. Still. This is not a fair comparison, but the used/refurb/old-stock PC market is just so ridiculously more capable. A HP EliteDesk G2 has i5-6500T (2015), 8GB ram, and 250GB SATA drive is $140 on amazon. It's a higher powered machine, 9W versus ~3W idle (shame on this review for having no power consumption figures at all), and much higher full-open power (I think my last kernel compile was <35W which is the TDP of the chip alone). And the OrangePi is significantly smaller form factor. There's cases where the OrangePi is a better fit. But for most general use, the x86 market has far far better value, does so much more, has so much more bandwidth (often 8x USB3.0 hosts, plus significant internal pcie). There's periodic articles on repurposing thin-client computer hardware. But again there's just such a mismatched value proposition. Not the same shakeout: they have hot, old, low-end chips, but sometimes very cheap on secondary markets. But there's typically much better mini-PCs with vastly more performance for not that much more, that will idle at least as well if not greatly better. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33791069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33791069 It's just so weird how few ARM chips are available. There had been a little more variety in who one could buy an SBC from. But now... Rockchip is the main company making purchaseable chips. Allwinner had some pretty fine offerings but has gotten sparse. MediaTek is doing excellent things in many spaces, but has almost no presence in accessible SBCs. There's tons of other chips but most of the market is invisible, is utterly uninterested in selling SBC type boards. There's a parallel x86 market, but Ryzen embedded systems tend to start at $400 for very sparse models. It's frustrating how deliberately unserved the low end is. That commodity x86 hardware dominates so savagely, by so many country-miles keeps feeling unfortunate. That ARM has such small niches it plays competitively in, and everywhere else it's broadly unavailable & unaffordable is a weird market dynamic, while these normally very expensive x86 cpus become available & affordable systems is such a strong & visible counter-trend. Also see: "Unpopular Opinion: Don't use an RPI for that" on these mini-PCs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35260322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35260322

ARandomerDude 4y ago

Upvoted this story so people who know more than will see it and comment. Don’t let me down, HN!

wmf 4y ago
It's the same price but 2x-3x faster. What more do you want to know?

theamk 4y ago

The hardware does not seem to be mainline supported, which means that you are at the mercy of a vendor. In other words, when they say "Ubuntu, Debian, Android, and Armbian" they don't actually mean you can run any future version of it, like you could for Raspberry Pi or x86 hardware. Instead, what they mean is: "We took a latest version of Debian/Ubuntu/Android/etc... and applied some patches to it to make it work on our board. But hey, it works today, and would maybe work next year too! And if you complain super hard we can fix some kernel bugs but no promises!" This lack of support is a big reason to stay away from less famous SBCs.. Sometimes all you want is to make a project and forget about it, and that maybe fine. But if you want something to base multiple projects on, keep to stuff with mainlined kernels.

happymellon 4y ago
It looks like they are working on getting the Rockchip RK3588 mainlined. CPU, PCI support is all there thanks to the QuartzPro64. At least with this one it looks like there are efforts rather than some of the other chipsets which don't have a chance.
- francisduvivier 4y ago
  There is a crazy amount of SBC's coming out with the RK3588, so I aldo think the chances are pretty good for this one.
  - rektide 4y ago
    Do any Rockchip chips have good upstream? Number of boards is not at all what I'd look for. Plenty of terrible sbc get made. The track record of the chipmaker is the important thing, to me. It's not always clear cut. I think now there may be a more formal relationship, but Allwinner used to have good support from purely volunteer Bay Libre. I'm far from certain but part of me wants to believe that's in sizable part also Allwinner doing a less ship, less ultra-forked job in the first place when they dump their own ugly gross hacked out vendor tree fork, where-as many of these vendor trees are just wildly awful. Again, just to reiterate, I would never ever use board count as an indicator. Especially these days where there are only 2-4 (at best) chips available for use. Of course there's lots of sbc with this chip: the specs are great, the performance appears impressive, & there's literally no other chips to buy. That the vendor kernel is garbage & maybe there are oodles of little design bugs is like, not a big impediment to releasing hardware. Alas.

PostOnce 4y ago

Every time somebody tells me something is a great alternative to a raspberry pi, it doesn't work or idles at 90c or comes unsoldered quickly or is missing critical software or all kinds of nonsense that makes it not a close alternative, especially not at a near price point. I'm willing to try stuff, but I'm skeptical of every new board because of previous bad experiences.

sliken 4y ago
I've had similar issues, but bought a NanoPi R6S with 8GB ram. Got ubuntu 22.04 going on the first day, and it's a nice little server. It's crazy faster than a Pi4, stable, and runs cool. I paid for the $20 CNC machines case with passive cooling. Under normal use it's quite cool to the touch, and plan to make it into a small home router after I'm done tinkering with it.
francisduvivier 4y ago
I have this board, you better add some cooling but I had no issue setting up docker containers with node red, prometheus, grafana, Emby and Home assistant. Too bad I currently can't succeed in using a raspberry pi camera on it.

gropo 4y ago

i have a handful of these and 4 core rpi goes faster than 6 core orange for many things.

rektide 4y ago
like what? the benchmarks here make that seem vastly vastly unlikely. please, put up. make claims that are at least contestable.
- francisduvivier 4y ago
  also wondering about this
  - gropo 4y ago
    is there some sort of bench you want to see the output of? ill try to reproduce/document for you.
    - gropo 4y ago
      okay, for example, the pi400 beats out the orangepi4 lts and orangepi 4b in the time it takes to make a sha256sum of a file
      - gropo 4y ago
        [flagged]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

russnes 4y ago

Also the RockPi 4 is pretty cool, with a full fledged m.2 socket and stronger GPU. It has mainline support although I had to chroot install void linux since there was no official image

francisduvivier 4y ago

Note that they just released the 5B version, which loses the M.2 slot buy gains emmc storage and wifi 6! I have the original 5 board running for some weeks now with some docker containers and it's running great.

istobic 4y ago

Orange Pi (Xunlong) has a record about not caring at all about up streaming their products. Mentioning the OPI 5 as an alternative to RPI4 is very abstruse.

ekianjo 4y ago
especially rich coming from phoronix which is a Linux focused publication. they should know better.
pmontra 4y ago
At least I could buy an OPI 5. RPI4 is basically RIP, let me pun about it. Who cares if it is mainlined if there is no way to buy it at all or at a reasonable price.
CyberDildonics 4y ago
Abstruse means obscure, I think you meant obtuse, which means annoyingly insensitive.

ekianjo 4y ago

Except that as usual its not on mainline so it becomes disposable junk once someone decides to drop support for it

snvzz 4y ago

Today, I am only looking forward, with RISC-V architecture. ARM SBCs are the past. I love my VisionFive 2. It is no Orange Pi 5, but it is fast enough, and it is RISC-V proper.

mihaaly 4y ago
> ARM SBCs are the past. Interesting statement. Care to elaborate?
- jimbomins 4y ago
  I've my doubts about Arm's future with the reports of intending to up the price of licensing. That strategy seems insane with the Risc-v progress and increased uptake by big tech companies.
  - snvzz 4y ago
    It'll be a spike in income, which will look good for IPO purposes. Then a sharp drop to nothing, as everybody has moved on to RISC-V. But by then the company will be long sold to suckers through IPO. So it doesn't matter.

xony 4y ago

[dead]

FpUser 4y ago

Well thank you but I've got burned enough with Raspberry Pi and Orange prices are still high. I've got better way to waste my money.

giuliomagnifico 4y ago

Hardware talking surely, but the software? I’m always feared about the support of some software when using RPi clones.

jimbomins 4y ago

£320 on Amazon does not seem to fall into affordable to me compared to a RPi 4