Orange Pi Is The Latest Raspberry Pi Inspired ARM Board

Written by Michael Larabel in Arm on 22 December 2014 at 12:59 PM EST. 20 Comments
ARM
The latest low-cost, Linux-friendly ARM single board computer is the Orange Pi that's trying to ride off the success of the Raspberry Pi.

The new Orange Pi is a series of Allwinner-based ARM SBCs with there being the Orange Pi Mini, Orange Pi, and Orange Pi Plus. The Orange Pi Mini and Orange Pi use a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 Allwinner A20 SoC with Mali-400 MP2 graphics. The Orange Pi Plus uses the Allwinner A321 quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC with PowerVR SGX544MP2 graphics. All three models ship with 1GB of RAM, SATA, and microSD storage support. The Orange Pi also features Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11g/n WiFi, USB 2.0, and expansion header.

Pricing on the Orange Pi Mini is just over $42, Orange Pi comes in around $50, and the Orange Pi Plus is closer to $80. The Allwinner SoCs tend to be open-source Linux friendly, albeit they're not the most powerful ARM SoCs out there. The pricing comes in higher than the Raspberry Pi boards while packing just a Cortex-A7 processor.


Personally I don't find the Orange Pi boards to be too interesting given their price for the hardware specs, the Mali and PowerVR hardware not having any end-user-ready/working open-source graphics driver support, etc. My personal favorite ARM SBC right now is the Jetson TK1, albeit I'm mostly concerned about Linux performance and graphics driver capabilities, so it's well worth the higher price.

Those wishing to learn more about the Orange Pi can visit OrangePi.org. Officially supported distributions for now are Android 4.4, Ubuntu, Debian, and Raspbian.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week