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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects
mrbluecoat wrote 2 min ago:
Meh. RISC-V performance is still pretty bad compared to other common
market options:
URI [1]: https://www.linuxlinks.com/benchmarking-the-orangepi-5-ultra-o...
xbar wrote 1 hour 6 min ago:
What a disastrously bad name.
leoedin wrote 1 hour 41 min ago:
The 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?
camel-cdr wrote 13 min ago:
> Who is buying these?
All people who want to optimize software for the RISC-V Vector
extension, as this is the most afordable SBC which supports it.
HeyLaughingBoy wrote 42 min ago:
There are many products that are only expected to sell in low volumes
and high margins. Also, prototyping, proof of concepts, one-offs,
etc. Those are all areas that I've seen them used.
lenerdenator wrote 47 min ago:
> 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?
Hobbyists, mainly.
I could see this being a hit with people who want to work with
RISC-V, which still needs a lot of low-level stuff built out for its
ecosystem. You don't need it to be a screamer, just for it to run
predictably.
Remember, the Raspberry Pi was mainly a hobbyist curiosity when it
came out. There's definitely a market.
FirmwareBurner wrote 53 min ago:
>Who is buying these?
If only you knew the ecosystem in China and Taiwan. Even a fraction
of the Chinese domestic market alone is enough.
Aurornis wrote 58 min ago:
You donât 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.
fibers wrote 1 hour 31 min ago:
Maybe 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.
DoctorOetker wrote 2 hours 24 min ago:
Don'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.
ur-whale wrote 3 hours 21 min ago:
What 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.
antonkochubey wrote 4 hours 25 min ago:
Ubuntu 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.
RainyDayTmrw wrote 32 min ago:
Kinda tricky. Last time this came up, the consensus was that
approximately nothing commercially available supported RVA23 at the
time.
proxysna wrote 3 hours 28 min ago:
Building Debian for this board is pretty easy nowadays. You can also
find prebuilt images.
mwcampbell wrote 2 hours 57 min ago:
Want to share any links, particularly about building one's own
Debian image? I'm especially curious about the bootloader.
proxysna wrote 2 hours 49 min ago:
[1] A good example. There is also a link to builscripts.
URI [1]: https://romanrm.net/rv-debian
haunter wrote 3 hours 37 min ago:
>I own one since a couple months ago but I already regret the
purchase.
This is me with every single SBC
irusensei wrote 1 hour 12 min ago:
My 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.
antonkochubey wrote 2 hours 52 min ago:
I 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.
magicalhippo wrote 3 hours 57 min 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 wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
only if you find it acceptable to have your IoT projects
participate in botnets down the line, I guess.
magicalhippo wrote 39 min ago:
Distributed computing is a perfect fit for IoT devices which
mostly sit idle. Put those cycles to use!
boredemployee wrote 4 hours 37 min ago:
for 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?
throwaway81523 wrote 5 hours 56 min ago:
Anyone have openssl benchmarks? I.e. run "openssl speed" and post the
output. Thanks!
self wrote 5 hours 20 min ago:
I don't know if it uses the vector instructions.
URI [1]: https://gist.github.com/faried/6955a992c6d68362fd1e07a1cd575...
Daviey wrote 6 hours 38 min ago:
No SATA :(
taneliv wrote 1 hour 36 min ago:
What is your project where 2 x NVMe is not suitable for storage?
Daviey wrote 1 hour 27 min ago:
I'd like a decent RISC or ARM SBC for a NAS.
self wrote 6 hours 21 min ago:
I 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).
goodpoint wrote 6 hours 44 min ago:
$40 is too expensive
yogorenapan wrote 6 hours 18 min ago:
Depends 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 wrote 5 hours 53 min ago:
I 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
sylware wrote 7 hours 35 min ago:
RISC-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 wrote 1 hour 31 min ago:
Noscript? 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.
swetland wrote 7 hours 38 min ago:
Don'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)
qludes wrote 1 hour 42 min ago:
[1] (from orangepi.cn) links to a Ky X1 chip manual.pdf
URI [1]: https://pan.baidu.com/s/1qbLD7j1nw3fRlNq09U8l9g?pwd=511c
self wrote 6 hours 24 min ago:
Spacemit's website is a pain to use, but the processor appears to
work almost exactly like the K1, so:
- go to [1] - click on documentation
- click on Keystone
- click on K1
URI [1]: https://developer.spacemit.com/
moffkalast wrote 6 hours 51 min ago:
Raspberry wouldn't be the market leader if Orange, Rock and the rest
could write documentation and support to save their life.
rcarmo wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
I had a go at it a few months ago: [1] Not bad at all, but the OpenWRT
image still didnât have Wi-Fi support a week or so ago, so I donât
know how good software support is going to be in the long run.
URI [1]: https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/05/12/2230
asadm wrote 8 hours 18 min ago:
2 TOPS is not a lot for AI projects.
numpad0 wrote 4 hours 13 min ago:
Hopefully Adafruit or someone could get these[1] out of "Contact Us"
jail. 16GB 30TOPS BF16 in M.2 2280 at $369. PCIe 2x8 low profile
"Duo" configuration available at $799. Supposedly. I believe the
theoretical performance is Strix territory if these could be
clustered, but only if they mass manufacture these.
1:
URI [1]: https://www.edgecortix.com/en/hardware
muxamilian wrote 6 hours 37 min ago:
They get this number by simply adding up all CPUs' processing speed.
There is no NPU or similar:
URI [1]: https://medium.com/@zlodeibaal/orange-pi-rv2-ai-board-scam-7...
OhMeadhbh wrote 7 hours 25 min ago:
meh. i write a lot of PROLOG, so 2 TOPS is A LOT of horsepower.
jdiaz97 wrote 7 hours 58 min ago:
It's a lot for 40 USD. And not every AI project is a Language Model
project.
5d41402abc4b wrote 8 hours 52 min ago:
Are there any SBC with memory slot so that i can plug in 32GiB or more
of RAM?
revengerwizard wrote 3 min ago:
It baffles me that virtually all ARM and RISC-V boards have soldered
RAM.
muyuu wrote 2 hours 15 min ago:
the only one i've seen in a comparably small form factor is the UDOO
Bolt [1] 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:
[2] )
the Orange Pi 5 plus comes with 16GiB but the price jumps to US$160+
or 32GiB for US$ 270+
URI [1]: https://www.udoo.org/discover-the-udoo-bolt/
URI [2]: https://www.amazon.com/Orange-Pi-RV2-Development-Ubuntu24-04...
Havoc wrote 7 hours 16 min ago:
Orange pi 5 plus has 32gb versions. Pricey though
ekianjo wrote 4 hours 16 min ago:
No memory slot though
chithanh wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
Yes, 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 wrote 6 hours 26 min ago:
Still so mad about that
rcarmo wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
Not 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.
protocolture wrote 8 hours 54 min ago:
I keep seeing suggestions that theres no software support for Orange
Pi.
Whats the go there? Is there no distro like Raspbian supporting it?
OhMeadhbh wrote 7 hours 27 min ago:
There'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.
chithanh wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
Xunlong (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.
rcarmo wrote 8 hours 12 min ago:
There are plenty of Orange Pi boards with Armbian or unofficial
Ubuntu support, but theyâre ARM based.
jauntywundrkind wrote 8 hours 56 min ago:
Absolutely smoked by rpi5, often by rpi4. To make matters worse, a
radically unsupported core with no mainline support.
URI [1]: https://www.phoronix.com/review/orange-pi-rv2-benchmarks/2
cbm-vic-20 wrote 2 hours 35 min ago:
I 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.
Havoc wrote 7 hours 15 min ago:
Donât think people buy riscv for their performance competitiveness
at this stage
moffkalast wrote 6 hours 49 min ago:
People don't really buy RISCV at all at this point, there's noting
less compatible you could get if you tried.
Imustaskforhelp wrote 6 hours 5 min ago:
isn'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.
ekianjo wrote 8 hours 59 min ago:
More info here from a few months back:
URI [1]: https://boilingsteam.com/orange-pi-rv2-new-risc-v-board-review...
kirito1337 wrote 2 days ago:
I don't like RISC-V unless it has a good GPU
microtherion wrote 3 hours 33 min ago:
Theoretically the vector extensions in a RISC-V could be scaled
considerably, it seems to me, especially when combined with the
extension proposed here: [1] 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.
URI [1]: https://github.com/spacemit-com/riscv-ime-extension-spec
rjsw wrote 6 hours 3 min ago:
RISC-V designs typically have an Imagination Technologies GPU, some
support for them is in recent versions of Linux and mesa.
webdevver wrote 9 hours 13 min ago:
they all suck. someone needs to make an open source gpu already, its
been way too long.
Findecanor wrote 7 hours 54 min ago:
It is at least theoretically possible to build a headless "GPU"
from RISC-V processors that have the vector extension (RVV). RVV
had been designed to be able to run programs compiled for the SIMT
execution model that most GPUs use.
This Orange Pi RV2 has a small vector unit in each core, and could
be used for at least prototyping the software until more powerful
chips are available.
BTW. There have also been a couple hardware startups that have been
working on commercial GPUs based on RISC-V's vector extension, with
their own GPU-specific instruction set extensions for texture
lookup and the like.
LeFantome wrote 6 hours 14 min ago:
URI [1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/startup-...
Joel_Mckay wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
The 94% market dominance of CUDA GPUs will roast new
competition for sure.
RISC-V has a fragmented ISA standard, and every version is a
magical unicorn part (the worst facet of ARM6.)
A Standard doesn't need to be good, but must be consistent to
succeed. =3
timschmidt wrote 8 hours 32 min ago:
We did back in 2007: [1] And there have been some others as well:
[2] Recently [3] Part of the problem is that every ASIC
manufacturer (and indeed each fabrication process) has a different
toolchain with a different set of primitives for circuit design.
Yosys and other open tooling for FPGAs has helped a great deal in
lowering the barrier to chip design and by association reuse of
circuits. But every ASIC, at the moment, is tied to some vendor's
PDK. Here's the one Google open sourced for Cypress Semi's SKY130
process node:
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Graphics_Project
URI [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_graphic...
URI [3]: https://www.furygpu.com/
URI [4]: https://github.com/google/skywater-pdk
ekianjo wrote 8 hours 58 min ago:
It's probably a series of patent landmines...
AnthonyMouse wrote 8 hours 23 min ago:
Hardware 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 wrote 1 hour 43 min ago:
Indeed, 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
snvzz wrote 2 days ago:
Attach your favourite GPU at the PCIe slot.
warrenm wrote 2 days ago:
GPUs are [effectively] irrelevant for many use cases (IoT, embedded,
most servers, etc)
Joel_Mckay wrote 1 hour 52 min ago:
On 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
_zoltan_ wrote 8 hours 35 min ago:
the title says "... AI projects". now, maybe our definitions are
different, but you probably want some hardware acceleration.
pjmlp wrote 6 hours 58 min ago:
Most likely comming in vector, matrix instructions or NPU like
chipsets, not necessarly GPUs.
jdiaz97 wrote 7 hours 43 min ago:
The chip (KY X1) comes with AI acceleration...
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