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OrangePi 6 Plus Review
- fweimer 10mo agoUnfortunately, this board seems to be using the CIX CPU that has power management issues: > 15W at idle, which is fairly high
- moffkalast 10mo agoAnd here I was thinking the Pi 5 which idles at 3W was unreasonably high.
- odie5533 10mo agoFor comparison, an N150 mini PC uses around 6 watts at idle.
- suprjami 10mo agoI have a pre-Ryzen AMD thin client which draws MAXIMUM 10W. Idle 5W. A lot less CPU power but still. 15W for a modern SBC is a joke.
- eleventyseven 10mo agoThe review shows ARM64 software support is still painful vs x86. For $200 for the 16gb model, this is the price point where you could just get an Intel N150 mini PC in the same form factor. And those usually come with cases. They also tend to pull 5-8w at idle, while this is 15w. Cool if you really want ARM64, but at this end of the performance spectrum, why not stick with the x86 stack where everything just works a lot easier?
- baobun 10mo agoWith RAM it will be costing notably more, with 4 cores instead of 12. I'd expect this to run circles around an N150 for single-threaded perf too. They are not in the same class, which is reflected in the power envelope. BTW what's up with people pushing N150 and N300 in every single ARM SBC thread? Y'all Intel shareholders or something? I run both but not to the exclusion of everything else. There is nothing I've failed to run successfully on my ARM ones and the only thing I haven't tried is gaming.
- trollied 10mo agoNo idea - the ryzen based ones are better!
- rufo 10mo agoDepends on what you need - for pure performance regardless of power usage and 3D use cases like gaming, agreed. For performance per watt under load and video transcoding use cases, the 12th-gen E-core CPUs ala the N100 are _really_ hard to beat.
- eleventyseven 10mo ago1. Wow, never thought I'd need to do an investment disclosure for an HN comment. But sure thing: I'm sure Intel is somewhere in my 401K's index funds, but also probably Qualcomm. But I'm not a corporate shill, thank you very much for the good faith. Just a hobbyist looking to not get seduced by the lastest trend. If I were an ARM developer that'd be different, I get that. 2. The review says single core Geekbench performance is 1290, same as i5-10500 which is also similar to N150, which is 1235. 3. You can still get N150s with 16gb ram in a case for $200 all in.
- ekianjo 10mo ago> review says single core Geekbench performance is 1290, same as i5-10500 which is also similar to N150, which is 1235. Single core, yes. Multi core score is much higher for this SBC vs the N150.
- drnick1 10mo agoBut realistically, most workloads of the kind you would run on these machines don't scale benefit from multithreading as much as single core performance. At least at home these machines will do things like video streaming, router, or serving files. Even if you want to use it in the living room as a console/emulator, you are better off with higher single core performance and fewer cores than the opposite.
- ekianjo 10mo agoYes x86 will win for convenience on about every metric (at least for now), but this SoC's CPU is much faster than a mere Intel N150 (especially for multicore use cases).
- rpcope1 10mo agoI've got i3 and i5 systems that do 15W or better idle, and I don't have to worry about the absolute clusterfuck of ARM hardware (and those systems used can be had for less and will probably long outlive mystery meat ARM SBCs).
- overfeed 10mo agoOne of my Arm systems idles at leas than 1W and has a max TDP less than your idle draw (10W). I also have an N200 box, and a 16-core workstation with an obscene power draw - each platform has its pros and cons. I noticed nuance is the first thing discarded in the recurring x86 vs Arm flame wars, with each side minimizing the strength of the "opposing" platform. Pick the right tool for the right job, there are use-cases where the Orange Pi 6 is the right choice.
- cmrdporcupine 10mo agoI've got two RK3588 boards here doing Linux-y things around my place (Jellyfin, Forgejo builders, Immich, etc) and ... I don't think I've run into pain? They're running various debian and just ... work? I can't think of a single package that I couldn't get for ARM64. Likewise my VPS @ Hetzner is running Aarch64. No drama. Only pain is how brutal the Rust cross-compile is from my x86 machine. I mean, here's Geerling running a bunch of Steam games flawlessly on a Aarch64 NVIDIA GB10 machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjRKvKC4ntw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjRKvKC4ntw (Those things are expensive, but I just ordered one [the ASUS variant] for myself.) Meanwhile Apple is pushing the ARM64 architecture hard, and Windows is apparently actually quite viable now? Personally... it's totally irrational, but I have always had a grudge against x86 since it "won" in the early 90s and I had to switch from 68k. I want diversity in ISAs. RISC-V would be nice, but I'll settle for ARM for now.
- drnick1 10mo agoAgreed, at least for a likely "home use" case, such as a TV box, router, or general purpose file server or Docker host, I don't see how this board is better than something like a Beelink mini PC. The Orange Pi does not even come with a case, power supply or cooler. Contrast that with a Beelink that has a built-in power supply (no external brick) and of course a case and cooler.
- ekianjo 10mo agoThis OrangePi 6 Plus board comes with cooling and a power supply (usb-c). No case, though.
- drnick1 10mo agoFair enough, but I suppose it does not come which storage (NVME). Typically ready to use NUCs that retail for around $200 do. That's often only about 0.5GB, so not a use amount of storage, but more than enough for a streaming box or retro console, say.
- ekianjo 10mo agoCorrect, you have to buy the NVME storage separately.
- Youden 10mo agoFrom the article: "[...] the Linux support for various parts of the boards, not being upstreamed and mainlined, is very likely to be stuck on an older version. This is usually what causes headaches down the road [...]". The problem isn't support for the ARM architecture in general, it's the support for this particular board. Other boards like the Raspberry Pi and many boards based on Rockchip SoCs have most of the necessary support mainlined, so the experience is quite painless. Many are starting to get support for UEFI as well.
- eleventyseven 10mo agoThat makes sense, as the Pi is as easy as x86 at this point. I almost never have to compile from scratch. I'm not a compiler expert... But it seems each ARM64 board needs its own custom kernel support, but once that is done, it can support anything compiled to ARM64 as a general target? Or will we still need to have separate builds for RPi, for this board, etc?
- ZiiS 10mo agoApart from very rare cases, this will run any linux-arm64 binary.
- StephenHerlihyy 10mo agoLittle bit of both. Pi still uses a sort of unique boot sequence due to it’s heritage. Most devices will have the CPU load the bootloader and then have the OS bring up the GPU. Pi sort of inverts this, having the GPU leading the charge with the CPU held at reset until after the GPU has finished it’s boot sequence. Once you get into the CPU though the Aarch64 registers become more standardized. You still have drivers and such to worry about and differing memory offsets for the peripherals - but since you have the kernel running it’s easier to kind of poke around until you find it. Pi 5 added someone complexity to this with the RP1 South Bridge which adds another layer of abstraction. Hopefully that all makes sense. Basically the Pi itself is backwards while everything else should conform. It’s not Arm specific, but how the Pi does things.
- ekianjo 10mo ago
- chvid 10mo agoIt allows you to build for what is coming. In a couple of years arm hardware this powerful will cheap and common.
- knowitnone3 10mo agothe high end of the performance is impressive and this has idle power similar to the processors in it's performance range(AMD Ryzen 7 4800H idles at 45W). This is certainly not meant for lower power computing.
- plagiarist 10mo agoI was soured on ARM SBCs by the Orange Pi 5, which does not have an option to ignore its SD card during boot. Something trivial on basically every x86 platform I had been taking for granted.
- kbar13 10mo agoi use the rpi zero 2 for the IO pins 4b / 5 for the camera stuff. i don’t think using these boards for just compute makes a lot of sense unless it’s for toy stuff like an ssh shell or pihole
- Saris 10mo agoI feel like SBC stuff hasn't been worth it over x86 boxes like that for awhile now. Other than the GPIO being useful in certain use cases. N100 boxes are cheap and use so little power, while having normal OS support and boot setup.
- andy99 10mo agoWhen something has an 30 TOPS NPU, what are the implications? Do NPUs like this have some common backend that ggml/llama.cpp targets? Is it proprietary and only works for some specific software? Does it have access to all the system RAM and at what bandwidth? I know the concept has been around for a while but no idea if it actually means anything. I assume that people are targeting ones in common devices like Apple, but what about here?
- ekianjo 10mo agoIt needs specific support, and for example llama.cpp would have support for some of them. But that comes with limitations in how much RAM they can allocate. But when they work, you see a flat CPU usage and the NPU does everything for inference.
- cmrdporcupine 10mo agoCan't speak to this specific NPU but these kind of accelerators are really made more for more general ML things like machine vision etc. For example while people have made the (6 TOPS) NPU in the (similar board) RK3588 work with llama.cpp it isn't super useful because of the RAM constraints. I believe it has some sort of 32-bit memory addressing limit, so you can never give it more than 3 or 4 GB for example. So for LLMs, not all that useful.
- Y_Y 10mo agoThe specific NPU doesn't seem to be mentioned in TFA, but my guess is that the blessed way to deal with it is the Neon SDK: https://www.arm.com/technologies/neon https://www.arm.com/technologies/neon I've not found Neon to be fun or easy to use, and I frequently see devices ignoring the NPU and inferring on CPU because it's easier. Maybe you get lucky and someone has made a backend for something specific you want, but it's not common.
- snops 10mo agoTFA does directly mention the NPU "Arm-China Zhouyi: 30 TOPS (Dedicated)" "you cannot simply use standard versions of PyTorch or TensorFlow out of the box. You must use the NeuralONE AI SDK." Neon is a SIMD instruction set for the CPU, not a separate accelerator. It doesn't need an SDK to use, it's supported by compiler intrinsics and assembly language in any modern ARM compiler.
- dingi 10mo agoWhy bother with these obscure boards with spotty software support when you can get a better deal all around with an x86 mini PC with a N150 CPU?
- hohithere 10mo agoExactly! Just grab a mini PC such an Optiplex, it will be so much better.
- xgulfie 10mo agoI bought a used thinkcentre tiny off of eBay. It's got great GPU decoding/encoding support, great driver support for all the peripherals, and can boot from an m2 NVME or a SATA drive, it has a very normal bootloader. It can even run Windows. The mostly-aluminum enclosure is very nice and well-engineered, it's easy to pop open, it has a power button. It was under $100 and makes me question why any hobbyist bothers with SBCs like these.
- prmoustache 10mo agoe-*ing-waste if you have to wait for manufacturer to provide supported images. Upstream the drivers to the mainline kernel or go bankrupt. Nobody should buy these.
- yiyayo110 10mo agothis. Warning: do not buy any SBC without mainline kernel support, or if you have to download an unverified image from a google drive.
- exasperaited 10mo agoHow are we still in a world where there are breathless, hand-waving blog posts written about the theoretical potential of super-fast SBCs for which the manufacturer shows fuck all interest in competent OS support? Yet again, OrangePi crank out half-baked products and tech enthusiasts who quite understandably lack the deep knowledge to do more than follow others' instructions on how to compile stuff talk about it as if their specifications actually matter. Yet again the HN discourse will likely gather around stuff like "why not just use an N1x0" and side quests about how the Raspberry Pi Foundation has abandoned its principles / is just a cynical Broadcom psyop / is "lagging behind" in hardware. This stuff can be done better and the geek world should be done excusing OrangePi producing hardware abandonware time after time. Stop buying this crap and maybe they will finally start focussing on doing more than shipping support for one or two old kernels and last year's OS while kicking vague commitments about future support just far enough down the road that they can release another board first. Please stop falling for it :-/ ETA: I think what grinds my gears the most is that OrangePi, BananaPi etc., are largely free-riding off the Linux community while producing products that only "beat" the market-defining manufacturers (Raspberry Pi, BeagleBoard) because they treat software support as an uncosted externality. This kind of "build it and they will use it" logic works well for microcontrollers, where a manufacturer can reasonably expect to produce a chip with a couple of tech demos, a spec sheet and a limited C SDK and people will find uses for it. But for "near-desktop class" SBCs it is not much better than misrepresentation. Consequently these things are e-waste in a way that even the global desk drawer population of the Raspberry Pi does not reach. And yet they are graded on a curve and never live up to their potential.
- commandersaki 10mo agoWhat is wrong with BananaPi? My understanding is it used for the basis for the OpenWRT community flagship router.
- exasperaited 10mo agoI wouldn’t be surprised if it performs adequately in this context —- isn’t the manufacturer a VOIP device maker? The reality is that they spam the market with a large number of products with little consistency, poor (if labyrinthine) documentation, random google drive links for firmware etc., and there are the same issues with hardware support. I dunno, maybe the situation there is better than it was. But the broad picture is the same: better hardware but you are basically on your own.
- mintflow 10mo agoI have a software that need to build aarch64 (for some aarch64 box with 4 core cpu), currently using Oracle cloud's 4core24G Arm neoverse n1 as github self host runner to build it. Seems this machine is more powerful than it, definitely attractive to me for a physical aarch64 self host runner.
- cyclotol 10mo agoYet another board which will never have proper upstream support because the SoC vendor refused to implement the ARM BSA standard which would provide EFI/ACPI support instead of relying on undiscoverable devices only exposed through device tree. ACPI isn't perfect but it's way better than device trees which are seldom updated so the device will remain stuck with old kernels.
- bfrog 10mo agoDevicetree continues to be a massive crutch for arm soc vendors.
- bhewes 10mo agoThe half baked hardware comments are humerous, because pretty much any piece of software is half baked if we are lucky.
- while_true_ 10mo agoI think the sweet spot for ARM SBCs are smaller, less powerful and cheaper for headless IOT edge cases. I use a couple of them that way when I need LAN connectivity, either by ethernet or wifi, and things wired to GPIO pins. I don't need a powerful CPU or lots of RAM for that. The SBC makers are caught up in a horsepower race and I just shrug, it's not for me.
- idatum 10mo agoThis is my experience as well. I have a couple PINE64 devices, a Rock64 (Rockchip RK3328) and a RockPro64 (RK3399). And an N150 device. Both ARM64 devices run headless, make use of GPIO, and have more than enough CPU. In fact, these are stable enough that I run BSDs on them and don't bother with Linux. The Rock64 runs FreeBSD for SDR applications (e.g. ADS-B receiver). FreeBSD has stable USB support for RTL-SDR devices. The RockPro64 runs NetBSD with ZFS with a PCIe SSD. NetBSD can handle ARM big.LITTLE well. I run several home lab workloads on this. Fun device. I also have an N150 device running the latest Debian 13 as my main home lab server for home automation, Docker, MQTT broker, etc. In short: SBCs are cheap enough that you can choose more than one, each for the right task, including IoT.
- tra3 10mo agoI'm setting up to run an APRS iGate. Is Rock64 a decent alternative to Pi with Linux?
- cedws 10mo agoWithout mainline Linux support I have no interest in these more obscure SBCs. Mainline Linux is the bare minimum, put in some effort please manufacturers.
- ekianjo 10mo agoNote that this is also happening with Nvidia and the Jetson boards.
- anonymousiam 10mo agoMy experience with the OrangePi 4 LTS has been poor, and I'm unwilling to purchase more of their hardware. Mine is now running Armbian because I didn't care for the instability, or for the Chinese repos. They seem uninterested in trying to get their hardware supported by submitting their patches for inclusion in the Linux kernel, and popular distros. Instead, you have to trust their repos (based in PRC).
- knowitnone3 10mo agoyou keep insinuating PRC yet you don't realize you're already pwned just running their hardware no matter the OS.
- eyegor 10mo ago"Chinese repos" is a very charitable interpretation of the Google drive links they used to distribute the os. It seemed like it was on the free plan too, it often didn't work because it tripped the maximum downloads per month limit.
- KaiserPro 10mo agoIs the orangePi 6 plus really almost 4x as fast as an intel n100?
- poly2it 10mo agoThere are faster Intel chips though.
- seg_lol 10mo agoPrices are considerably higher through the links than quoted in the article. This usually happens when someone posts about a great deal for surplus hardware on Ebay or a hidden gem on aliexpress. Just the thundering herd of traffic causes algorithmic pricing to spike the price.
- daft_pink 10mo agoi really with raspberry pi foundation released a pi with built in nvme instead of using a hat. i think using flash memory is the true bottleneck on the system
- Narishma 10mo agoThe 500+ model has NVMe storage and comes with a 256GB drive.
- NitpickLawyer 10mo agoHeh, I'm the opposite. I wish the rpi stayed the course of cheapest "working" SBC, and move their high-end boards to a different brand. Raspberry Sigma, or 67 or whatever gets the younguns crazy these days. After the pandemic, the "25$" SBC suddenly became 100+ with low availability. The main thing that made rpis worth it is gone now, and they're all chasing number go up on benchmarks.
- daft_pink 10mo agoI hear you. There is obviously a lot of tension between price and performance. I think the introduction of boards with larger and larger ram specs really pushed the cost just before the pandemic and then scarcity spiked things even more. As when I purchased the rpi4, I got the maximum RAM and that became expensive. However, SD Cards are really terrible devices to run a general purpose computer on and they are designed for storing large files like photos, videos and mp3’s sequentially not the SWAP, logs, and databases that a full operating system is constantly writing and accessing in a random fashion. I think if you are running a base 2gb, then maybe absolute value makes sense, but once you start hitting the larger RAM configutations, an M2 slot is a no brainer. I think the cheapest working SBC is really the zero line.
- Havoc 10mo agoTheir approach to software support does leave a lot to be desired. For what it's worth though the v5 did have Talos support, so you could just throw that on there, connect it to a cluster and have a decent arm node that is fanless and has 32gb https://docs.siderolabs.com/talos/v1.12/platform-specific-installations/single-board-computers/orangepi_5 https://docs.siderolabs.com/talos/v1.12/platform-specific-in...
- mrbluecoat 10mo ago> at the beginning, my OrangePi did not boot ... Turns out that the firmware required an update to be able to boot No thanks.
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoI am newly interested in Compute Module style SBCs after I bought a one to toy around with. I was surprised to learn that the PCBs that interface to them are open specs and I can probably build myself more custom PCB solutions to match different form factors instead of being stuck with a bulky normal Raspberry Pi. I was pleased to learn that Radxa and Orange Pi have compatible similar boards. I have wanted to see more RISC SBCs so I may toy with these but I rather wait for the software support to get much richer.
- aunty_helen 10mo agoBuying one of these Pi knockoffs taught me one thing, software support is the key to raspberry pi’s success. Whenever I would have a problem, and it was more often than not, I would search for a solution and come across something that worked for rpi that I could try to port across. Double the hardware spec matters little if you can’t get the software to even compile
- ekianjo 10mo ago> Double the hardware spec matters little if you can’t get the software to even compile You can get any software to compile on this SBC. On the Raspberry Pi platform you usually don't need to compile anything.
- fartfeatures 10mo agoDoes uboot work on this?
- Cieric 10mo agoI'm not sure I'm gonna grab another OrangePi board again. I was happy to grab the RV2 just to experiment around with, but I didn't realize that the linux kernel they provided to build their ubuntu distro doesn't actually build properly. I got it to build after throwing a version of ubuntu onto an unused pc, but then it didn't matter the options I selected for the build (like gui options) it seemed like the gui just didn't exist at all in the final binary. I've yet to try and build a 3rd party os with support since I spent so much time just trying to get the official distro to work properly.
- tclancy 10mo agoI thought the /. effect was to hug a site to death, not cause the price of the product under review to skyrocket. I see $414 instead of $258 now!
- ekianjo 10mo agoThis happens with algorithmic marketplaces.
- lateralux 10mo agoMy Orange Pi RV2 sucks :( The available distros, drivers, kernel, and tools do work, but they’re crappy, and poorly maintained. There’s no support and very little documentation, which is a real shame. From a hardware point of view, it’s a nice board and when I properly compiled some softwares myself I actually got really interesting performance, but it was a pain in the ass. So I ended up buying a Raspberry Pi 4, much better supported and documented.
- dgan 10mo agoWow this website just keep crashing my firefox, like 3 times in a row
- quadruple 10mo agoI am not a kernel developer, so I don't really have any idea what this means, but CIX appears to have patches in the Linux kernel[0], so I assume mainlining more stuff is in the works? [0] https://lwn.net/ml/all/20250609031627.1605851-1-peter.chen@cixtech.com/ https://lwn.net/ml/all/20250609031627.1605851-1-peter.chen@c...
- ekianjo 10mo agoThat is correct.
- kcb 10mo agoI have the itx board from radxa. This CIX chip is a disappointment, you'll never see the 2.8ghz.
- imcritic 10mo agoWeird article: it compares with raspberry pi 5 instead of OrangePi 5 Plus, the predecessor.
- ekianjo 10mo agoActually the Orange Pi 5 Ultra would be the most recent board from Orange Pi to compare it with. You can see a comparison between the Orange Pi 5 Ultra and the Raspberry Pi 5 here: https://boilingsteam.com/orange-pi-5-ultra-review/ https://boilingsteam.com/orange-pi-5-ultra-review/ In a nutshell, this new Orange Pi 6 Plus is much faster than Orange Pi 5 Ultra and anything that came before.
- RAMJAC 10mo agoPlus and ultra are almost identical with the exception of an HMDI in port on the latter. I've used the same HAL on both boards, they are effectively the same.
- sgnelson 10mo agoWe need an acronym for these types of boards: Yet Another SBC With Poor Longterm Support. YASBCWPLS. Really rolls off the tongue. Or we should just have "STS" (Short Term Support) after the board names to let others know the board will be essentially obsolete (based on lack of software updates) in two months.
- suprjami 10mo agoSTS - Shit Tier Support
- heresie-dabord 10mo ago> We need an acronym for these types of boards: Yet Another SBC With Poor Longterm Support. YASBCWPLS. Deadend is how I describe it.
- danielktdoranie 10mo agoCool. Somebody put it in a laptop please.
- heratsi 10mo agoI was in the market for cheaper sbc with npu and ended up using orange pi. Raspberry pi with ai hat was basically useless as i was not able to convert my neural networks to halio npu format. The software looked horrendous and felt, but it ended up working surprisingly well
- mskrasnov 10mo agoI'm still using the Orange Pi 3 LTS. It's been two years, I've managed to move to another city, and she's still in service. I use it mainly for testing my amateur projects, nothing more. Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu) from Xunlong are just terrible. I don't remember why, but I didn't like them. But Armbian has been running on such a computer for almost two years. Well, I love OPi ^)
- throwaway2037 10mo agoWhat is the Real World use case for dual 5Gbit/s Ethernet ports? I just don't understand how a relatively underpowered board could ever make good use of (combined) 10Gbit/s Ethernet bandwidth. Is this strictly bragging rights?