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Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects
- kirito1337 1y agoI don't like RISC-V unless it has a good GPU
- warrenm 1y agoGPUs are [effectively] irrelevant for many use cases (IoT, embedded, most servers, etc)
- _zoltan_ 1y agothe title says "... AI projects". now, maybe our definitions are different, but you probably want some hardware acceleration.
- jdiaz97 1y agoThe chip (KY X1) comes with AI acceleration...
- pjmlp 1y agoMost likely comming in vector, matrix instructions or NPU like chipsets, not necessarly GPUs.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dlcarrier 1y agoLow-power processors rarely have the AI accelerated instructions in the GPU, instead opting either for dedicated matrix/tensor cores, or as is used in the case, adding the acceleration instructions directly to the CPU core. This results in a higher performance per Watt, but doesn't scale well to higher-power applications.
- Joel_Mckay 1y agoOn Raspberry Pi, the GPU is the only thing that makes a responsive GUI or web-browser feasible, and is the primary reason most people use the HDMI LCD screens for games etc. It also took a large effort to bring up a v4l2 kernel driver for the camera modules etc. For example, on the CPU one may pin all cores to stream a USB camera or software decode h264. With the SoC GPU decoding or streaming with the v4l2 interface might take up 30% on one core (mainly to handle the network traffic.) The Raspberry Pi are not the fastest or "best" option (most focus on h264 or MJPEG hardware codecs), but the software/kernel ecosystem provides real value. Also, the foundation doesn't EOL their hardware often, or abandon software support after a single OS release. A cheap RISC-V SBC is great, but ISA versions are generally so fractured (copied the worst ideas of ARM6)... few OS will likely waste resources targeting a platform that will have 5 variants a year, and proprietary drivers. A Standard doesn't even need to be good, but must be consistent to succeed. =3
- snvzz 1y agoAttach your favourite GPU at the PCIe slot.
- webdevver 1y agothey all suck. someone needs to make an open source gpu already, its been way too long.
- ekianjo 1y agoIt's probably a series of patent landmines...
- AnthonyMouse 1y agoHardware patents are orthogonal to open source software. If a patent covers the hardware then someone who wants to manufacture the hardware needs to license the patent, but you were never going to get free-as-in-beer hardware anyway, and a hardware patent is independent of whether the hardware is fully documented or has firmware with published source code and a license that allows users to make changes to it.
- Joel_Mckay 1y agoIndeed, most IP used in silicon design are licensed, cost real money, and are under NDA. I wouldn't say "never", but a clone is highly unlikely for another decade or so. =3
- AnthonyMouse 1y agoNDAs in the context of a patent license should legitimately be considered grounds for patent invalidation. Patent literally means "open to public inspection" and the entire premise is that you get a temporary monopoly in exchange for openly documenting how your invention works in the published patent. If there is something about the invention for an NDA to cover it means you left it out of the patent application, which is essentially an admission of wrongdoing. A patent is an alternative to a trade secret. You can't eat your cake and still have it.
- Joel_Mckay 1y ago
- rjsw 1y agoRISC-V designs typically have an Imagination Technologies GPU, some support for them is in recent versions of Linux and mesa.
- microtherion 1y agoTheoretically the vector extensions in a RISC-V could be scaled considerably, it seems to me, especially when combined with the extension proposed here: https://github.com/spacemit-com/riscv-ime-extension-spec https://github.com/spacemit-com/riscv-ime-extension-spec That said, the actual processor cores in this SBC seem to max out at 256 bit registers, which does not seem to be a lot.
- ekianjo 1y agoMore info here from a few months back: https://boilingsteam.com/orange-pi-rv2-new-risc-v-board-review/ https://boilingsteam.com/orange-pi-rv2-new-risc-v-board-revi...
- 5d41402abc4b 1y agoAre there any SBC with memory slot so that i can plug in 32GiB or more of RAM?
- rcarmo 1y agoNot really. Most in the ARM space, at least, are soldered on or you need to switch out the entire compute module. Intel ones (not mini-PCs, but industrial gear and things like the LattePanda) also tend to have soldered RAM.
- chithanh 1y agoYes, lots of Intel and AMD based SBCs have SO-DIMM slots, but you'll have to accept the 3.5" format. Regarding RISC-V SBCs, there was serious consideration to release the Milk-V Oasis with SG2380 and LPCAMM2. But this didn't work out as the SG2380 was held up by geopolitical issues.
- LeFantome 1y agoStill so mad about that
- Havoc 1y agoOrange pi 5 plus has 32gb versions. Pricey though
- ekianjo 1y agoNo memory slot though
- hamonrye 1y ago[flagged]
- muyuu 1y agothe only one i've seen in a comparably small form factor is the UDOO Bolt https://www.udoo.org/discover-the-udoo-bolt/ https://www.udoo.org/discover-the-udoo-bolt/ but it's an x86 system and pricey, and borderline not an SBC memory is soldered in most of these smaller systems including the Orange Pi and it's the main price differentiator RAM is by far the most expensive thing in those systems past the very lowest specs, this one goes from 2GiB to 8GiB AFAICS (amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/Orange-Pi-RV2-Development-Ubuntu24-04/dp/B0DZ6YG1XC https://www.amazon.com/Orange-Pi-RV2-Development-Ubuntu24-04... ) the Orange Pi 5 plus comes with 16GiB but the price jumps to US$160+ or 32GiB for US$ 270+
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoAbsolutely smoked by rpi5, often by rpi4. To make matters worse, a radically unsupported core with no mainline support. https://www.phoronix.com/review/orange-pi-rv2-benchmarks/2 https://www.phoronix.com/review/orange-pi-rv2-benchmarks/2
- Havoc 1y agoDon’t think people buy riscv for their performance competitiveness at this stage
- moffkalast 1y agoPeople don't really buy RISCV at all at this point, there's noting less compatible you could get if you tried.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoisn't there box64 that can run x64 applications? And I think a language like golang can be a really really nice fit given how it can be compiled really fast towards risc-v as well Maybe java also runs in risc-v I am not sure, surely people are working on java support I suppose. People buy risc-v to support an open standard and to not worry about licensing fees. Isro (india's nasa basically) uses some risc-v chips to not license arm chips etc. because of either better national security (to have less arm influence) or because they don't want licensing fees given how rudiculously price efficient isro is.
- cbm-vic-20 1y agoI can accept the performance issues for now- it's an emerging platform, and hasn't had the huge amounts of resources poured into it like ARM. There's a chicken-and-egg problem here, since those resources will be limited since people aren't buying RISC-V equipment, which limits the incentive to commit resources, etc. But what I cannot accept is the truly awful documentation and software support from the vendors. This is where Raspberry Pi shines, and is IMO one of the most significant factors in its success. I'm excited that RPi is dipping their toes into the RISC-V pool with the Hazard3 cores in the RP2350- perhaps they will be able to release a Raspberry Pi RISC-V edition board some day. But I'm hesitant to buy one of the current RV SBCs, so I guess I'm part of the problem. I'm also surprised that there aren't any startups producing small, simple CPUs and SOCs outside of China (as least, none that I'm aware of). Is there no investment available in India, N. America, Japan, Europe, Israel (* not bringing the current situation into this, just noting they have chip fabs)? Fabricating chips is not cheap, but the first ones don't need to be the top-of-the-line TSMC 3nm process.
- protocolture 1y agoI keep seeing suggestions that theres no software support for Orange Pi. Whats the go there? Is there no distro like Raspbian supporting it?
- rcarmo 1y agoThere are plenty of Orange Pi boards with Armbian or unofficial Ubuntu support, but they’re ARM based.
- chithanh 1y agoXunlong (Orange Pi) operates similarly to Pine64, throw hardware at the community and then let the community figure out the software part. They provide official OS images at release but don't care much afterwards.
- dlcarrier 1y agoPine64's claim to fame is that they have really good documentation, surpassing even the Raspberry Pi. That's what creates a good community around their products. Most customers couldn't port software to an SBC, but for the ones who can, having all of the documentation makes it trivially easy, and having any that share their work makes it available to the whole community. Check out the Oz64 documentation, (https://pine64.org/documentation/Oz64/_full/ https://pine64.org/documentation/Oz64/_full/) which includes schematics and links to the datasheets for all of the major components. Raspberry Pi products, on the other hand, need some pretty intense reverse engineering to develop on: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/reverse-engineering-all-raspberry-pis https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/reverse-engineering-a.... For my use case, and most Pine64 customers, I'd rather have the hardware documentation than off-the-shelf official support for a software stack. Raspberry Pi has an entirely different user base. Orange Pi fills a similar niche, and really anyone releasing RISC-V SBCs at this point does too, as it's too early into the development of the architecture for microprocessor-level products.
- OhMeadhbh 1y agoThere's a RV64 port of Debian and the RV2 and R2S are on the list of compatible hardware. No guarantee it'll be easy getting it loaded, it was like pulling teeth to get it on the SiFive U74 board, but that was 7 years ago, so it's GOT to be better by now.
- asadm 1y ago2 TOPS is not a lot for AI projects.
- jdiaz97 1y agoIt's a lot for 40 USD. And not every AI project is a Language Model project.
- asadm 1y agono its not. Just use a smaller rockchip, 1-2 actual TOPS in ~$20 as a board or $10 a piece. i am using one for my project.
- OhMeadhbh 1y agomeh. i write a lot of PROLOG, so 2 TOPS is A LOT of horsepower.
- muxamilian 1y agoThey get this number by simply adding up all CPUs' processing speed. There is no NPU or similar: https://medium.com/@zlodeibaal/orange-pi-rv2-ai-board-scam-7c71a93d63f1 https://medium.com/@zlodeibaal/orange-pi-rv2-ai-board-scam-7...
- asadm 1y agothats even worse. 0 TOPS! The whole point is offloading load from CPU and doing something in parallel while NPU does its thing.
- dlcarrier 1y agoFour of the eight cores have matrix accelerators. If you are using the full 2 TOPS of accelerated performance, you have four more otherwise symmetric cores free to run regular workloads, otherwise you have eight. I'd rather have this setup than 4 regular cores and a separate asymmetric accelerator that provides 2 TOPS to matrix/tensor calculations but otherwise sits idle.
- numpad0 1y ago
- rcarmo 1y agoI had a go at it a few months ago: https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/05/12/2230 https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/05/12/2230 Not bad at all, but the OpenWRT image still didn’t have Wi-Fi support a week or so ago, so I don’t know how good software support is going to be in the long run.
- swetland 1y agoDon't suppose there's actually documentation for the CPU anywhere? (I mean more than a tiny "datasheet" with a very high level overview and/or a pile of random Linux/uboot patches)
- moffkalast 1y agoRaspberry wouldn't be the market leader if Orange, Rock and the rest could write documentation and support to save their life.
- self 1y agoSpacemit's website is a pain to use, but the processor appears to work almost exactly like the K1, so: - go to https://developer.spacemit.com/ https://developer.spacemit.com/ - click on documentation - click on Keystone - click on K1
- qludes 1y agohttps://pan.baidu.com/s/1qbLD7j1nw3fRlNq09U8l9g?pwd=511c https://pan.baidu.com/s/1qbLD7j1nw3fRlNq09U8l9g?pwd=511c (from orangepi.cn) links to a Ky X1 chip manual.pdf
- sylware 1y agoRISC-V going forward, one of the only beacons of hope in the silicon world. I need one of such devices for my self-hosted services. And it will be time to port from C to assembly, really, because we have finally a CPU ISA which is 'sweet spot' balanced, standard, global, pushed forward with significant resources and without IP locks anywhere. No more developer/vendor lock-in via "the only compiler able to generate correct machine code", extremely hard to do planned obsolescence, etc, we need mainstream adoption NOW :) The main blocker: how do I buy such device with a noscript/basic (x)html browser? And no way I use a credit card on a web site: would require well identified bank swift account, or wallet codes bought from local and physical currency terminals. I don't know of any local retailers I can buy such device from. Yep, the "web geniuses" at amazon (which supports wallet code) broke noscript/basic (x)html support a few years ago.
- nine_k 1y agoNoscript? No credit cards? Why these complications? Run a VM or a container with a full-blown browser, then throw it away. Get a merchant-locked, ephemeral credit card at privacy.com or equivalent, or buy a preloaded anonymous card. Problem solved.
- sylware 1y agoCome on... how it is possible to miss the point that much?
- dlcarrier 1y agoI use Privacy.com to get temporary credit cards, to avoid the hassle of compromised credit card numbers, although it doesn't stop various governments from tracking my transactions. I've bought RISC-V SBCs from both Pine64.com and Arace.tech, and neither required I make an account. Arace.tech does require JavaScript to checkout, but Pine64.com does appear to work without it, although I didn't complete a transaction without it. Pine64.com also accepts USDC payments, but no other cryptocurrency.
- sylware 1y ago
- goodpoint 1y ago$40 is too expensive
- yogorenapan 1y agoDepends what you're using it for. A lot of people tend to buy pi-likes as servers which is absolutely bonkers. If you time eBay right, $50 would get you a fairly powerful intel NUC with much more performance and peripherals
- mavamaarten 1y agoI don't think it's bonkers. For running a true home server sure, there's more powerful things out there. But for hosting something like a ZigBee and Z-wave coördinator a Pi makes much more sense. Electricity is expensive, yo
- adgjlsfhk1 1y agoIt's pretty much the minimal cost for the form factor and accessories. It would be cool if they could make a $20 version with a lot less connectivity in a smaller form factor.
- dlcarrier 1y agoCheck out the the Bouffalo Labs BL808 or Sophon SG2000 series. They are a system-in-package products that contain a RISC-V CPU, RAM and flash memory all in a few mm square package, for a few dollars. Pine64 and Milk-V both have breakout boards for under $10. They only have RAM and flash in the hundreds of megabytes, not gigabytes, but they can run full Linux and are as capable as many household Wi-Fi routers. They include USB, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and wired Ethernet ports, and even have MIPI CSI and DSI interfaces for cameras and displays.
- adgjlsfhk1 1y agoThe SG2000 is pretty interesting. I do wish they had gone with a more homogeneous architecture (4 identical cores like the pi 2 zero), and it's RVV 0.7, but the next generation of this could be really interesting.
- Daviey 1y agoNo SATA :(
- self 1y agoI bought the 32 GB emmc module for it, for the root filesystem. I have a 500 GB nvme drive for everything else. I believe an nvme-to-sata riser will work, but I don't have one to test with (plus you'd need to power the sata drive with something else).
- taneliv 1y agoWhat is your project where 2 x NVMe is not suitable for storage?
- Daviey 1y agoI'd like a decent RISC or ARM SBC for a NAS.
- dlcarrier 1y agoThere's M.2 cards with PCIe to SATA bridges, which are great for a high-capacity low-speed NAS setups, especially with mechanical hard drives. Be sure to research the chipset before buying one, as some are notorious for poor driver support. If this is a practical application, I would recommend sticking with ARM for this generation, as RISC-V is still in early development. In a year or two we should start getting more standardized RISC-V processor implementations, with broader support.
- taneliv 1y agoAh, cool. I'd like the same, but with ECC RAM, so the options are even fewer. Have you looked into what someone suggested here, splitting the NVMe to some SATA ports? It didn't sound like a horrible solution, but I have no experience.
- throwaway81523 1y agoAnyone have openssl benchmarks? I.e. run "openssl speed" and post the output. Thanks!
- self 1y agoI don't know if it uses the vector instructions. https://gist.github.com/faried/6955a992c6d68362fd1e07a1cd575c1e https://gist.github.com/faried/6955a992c6d68362fd1e07a1cd575...
- throwaway81523 1y agoThanks! I'll compare it to my raspberry pi 4 when I get a chance.
- boredemployee 1y agofor tasks like face recognition and object detection, would this type of hardware have good performance in real world cases? or, what is the standard hardware that devs use for tasks like that?
- antonkochubey 1y agoUbuntu will not support RISC-V CPUs without RVA23 support going further, so this is stuck on 24.04 forever. There is no official Debian image either, and the Ubuntu version uses fixed kernel 6.6.47 with no further updates (it is not even installed from a repo). I own one since a couple months ago but I already regret the purchase.
- magicalhippo 1y ago> this is stuck on 24.04 forever But as a basis for IoT projects that's perfectly fine. They're meant to be install and forget.
- dotdi 1y agoonly if you find it acceptable to have your IoT projects participate in botnets down the line, I guess.
- magicalhippo 1y agoDistributed computing is a perfect fit for IoT devices which mostly sit idle. Put those cycles to use!
- haunter 1y ago>I own one since a couple months ago but I already regret the purchase. This is me with every single SBC
- antonkochubey 1y agoI owned every generation of Raspberry Pi and I still use the 5, 4, 3, and even a 2 Model B. Their software/ecosystem support is unmatched by any other SBC line.
- irusensei 1y agoMy pair of RockPro64s refuse to go to the drawer. Every time they are about to retire something comes up that is the perfect job for those machines. One is currently running Scripted to integrate my unifi cameras to HomeKit. Zero fans. I've equipped the other one with 2 beefy 22TB HDDs, Tailscale and Minio. I'll send to my parent's house to act as remote backups.
- ur-whale 1y agoWhat are the specs in term of CPU speed? So far, all the RISC-V SBC's I've tried were woefully under-powered compared to a comparably-priced Raspi.
- DoctorOetker 1y agoDon't buy an Orange Lie. I used to occasionally buy a single board computer ~10 to ~5 years ago. Then I waited until SBC's reached the 32GB RAM level. The first such affordable and performant board was an Orange Pi 5+ or 5B (I should double check, may add a comment later). I believe I wanted the Orange Pi 5+ but it was sold out, so I ordered and paid for the Orange Pi 5B (the 2 ethernet port variant) which was a bit more expensive but was still for sale. Both had 32GB RAM, my main requirement. There were multiple "flavors", with power adapters or with case or with memory card or eMMC etc. I chose the memory/eMMC version. I sent a message to ask them to give me heads-up when they are about to ship mine, and then I was patient. Then I waited, and waited, and waited. Too patient, after a long while I start looking up on forums if other people are also waiting. I discover I am not the only one. So I take up contact again and ask when the board will be shipped. They inform me the SBC is no longer manufactured, and offer me inflation-devalued currency. I check which single board computers they still sell, and indeed they no longer sell the 5B variant, but now the 5+ is back in stock. I ask them if they can just ship me the 5+ instead of the 5B. They refuse. OK, I ask them how much I can pay extra so they ship me the 5+ instead of their unilaterally discontinued 5B. They refuse. A few months pass by. I ask again if they intend to ship the 5B as agreed, or the 5+ as a substitute. So here comes the orange Lie: They claim they shipped it, and provide a DHL link. I first name (same as my father's) is German, even though I live in Belgium. Their DHL link, is a shipment to somewhere in Germany, with a weight far below the weight of a single board computer, and which was delivered just minutes before their sending this message claiming shipped delivery. I confront them that the weight of the SBC is advertised on their own site, and their DHL delivery link lists a value far below it, that I live in Belgium and the shipping address was in Belgium (I have 0 links to Germany), and that the timing of the delivery and their response message is so close it suggests people at customer support (presumably without arbitrary access to deliveries outside of the case) asked colleagues to let them know if a case pops up with a German delivery, so they can manually copy and paste bluff delivery of product X to customer Y as if it was my order to me into the message. I confront them and ask them to answer a numbered list of questions. They refuse to answer the questions (they can't without incriminating themselves), instead they offer me my money back. Don't buy into the orange lie. If you work for Orange Pie, feel free to msg me with a way to contact you, if you positively resolve my case I will remove this message.
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- leoedin 1y agoThe big ecosystem of SBCs confuses me a bit. Who is buying these? The work required to build an actual secure, maintainable product on top of an SBC is so big that you'd surely never use one of these. The hard work is all in software. You need a supplier with product lifetime guarantees and a known SoC manufacturer. If you're a hobbyist, unless you really don't value your time you'd be much better served buying an x86 PC or a Raspberry Pi for whatever project you've got. Any money saved buying one of these would be completely negated by the extra time taken to maintain it. So who's the target market? Are there products out there built on these? Or are they mostly just shipped straight into desk drawers? How many of these do they actually ship?
- fibers 1y agoMaybe for hobbyists it's more of practicing how to play around with embedded systems? Over a decade ago I sorta got burned by Odroid dropping support for one of their early units despite being much faster than the 2Bs that were selling at the time (plus the annoying cost of emmcs or whatever), so I absolutely agree with your point.
- Aurornis 1y agoYou don’t need that many customers to design and ship an SBC. The hobbyist market is enough to sustain these companies. They can sell accessories to increase their margins. Their contract manufacturer can incrementally build batches of the boards. Many of these boards serve as development boards for the parts they include. If you want a dev board to try this part or you need a cheap RISC-V system to test RISC-V things on, buying one of these is an easy choice.
- brucehoult 1y ago> You don’t need that many customers to design and ship an SBC. Right. An SoC takes five years and tens of millions of dollars. An SBC using that SoC can be designed and made in three months for the cost of a small team's salary -- possibly even just one person e.g. see Paul Stoffregen of Teensy fame, or Jonathan Oxer at Freetronics. I'll bet the teams at Sipeed, Banana Pi, Orange Pi etc are pretty small too.
- xbar 1y agoWhat a disastrously bad name.
- mrbluecoat 1y agoMeh. RISC-V performance is still pretty bad compared to other common market options: https://www.linuxlinks.com/benchmarking-the-orangepi-5-ultra-orange-pi-5-max-and-orangepi-rv2/ https://www.linuxlinks.com/benchmarking-the-orangepi-5-ultra...
- IshKebab 1y agoYeah I would wait until RISC-V SBCs have RVA23 and ideally ACPI & Unified Discovery support. Otherwise you're in abandoned software territory. I'm not sure if any RISC-V boards support ACPI, and Unified Discovery is not even specified yet, so ... yeah probably don't buy this. We'll get there. https://github.com/riscv/configuration-structure https://github.com/riscv/configuration-structure
- maxlin 1y agoI caught Orange Pi doing misleading advertising earlier, trying to make people hear that the CPU has an NPU. Does this actually have any AI hardware or not?
- dlcarrier 1y agoThe Ky X1 has AI acceleration on 4 of its 8 cores, creating 2 TOPS performance. There's a guide for running LLMs here: http://www.orangepi.org/orangepiwiki/index.php/Orange_Pi_RV2#Methods_for_Running_Large_Models http://www.orangepi.org/orangepiwiki/index.php/Orange_Pi_RV2...
- maxlin 1y agoThat looks quite similar to what I read before. For me those performance figures don't necessarily suggest it being any faster than just running on CPU so I'm still suspicious. Might research this a bit more. Of course even if there's no perf improvement but perf/watt is better, that be valid too. But sounds very marketing speaky
- dlcarrier 1y agoIt's not faster than running on an x86 CPU, but it's faster than an unaccelerated RISC-V CPU. The entire platform is more for development of RISC-V software, especially at the operating system level, than it is an end-user product. There's still a lot of development needed to get RISC-V perf/watt, even with acceleration, to match ARM and x86 systems. I would expect at least a couple of years until then. RISC-V microcontrollers are already getting there, competing well with M0, but that's an entirely different market.
- madduci 1y agoWithout mainline support, which it won't have soon, due to the lack of RVA23, this is just another trash product.