[HN Gopher] The Orange Pi 6 Plus
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The Orange Pi 6 Plus
Author : rcarmo
Score : 83 points
Date : 2026-04-11 17:48 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (taoofmac.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (taoofmac.com)
| Neywiny wrote:
| Disappointing on the NPU. I have found it's a point where
| industry wide improvement is necessary. People talk tokens/sec,
| model sizes, what formats are supported... But I rarely see an
| objective accuracy comparison. I repeatedly see that AI models
| are resilient to errors and reduced precision which is what
| allows the 1 bit quantization and whatnot.
|
| But at a certain point I guess it just breaks? And they need an
| objective "I gave these tokens, I got out those tokens". But I
| guess that would need an objective gold standard ground truth
| that's maybe hard to come by.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| just try to find some benchmark top_k, temp, etc parameters for
| llama.cpp. There's no consistent framing of any of these
| things. Temp should be effectively 0 so it's atleast
| deterministic in it's random probabilities.
| Neywiny wrote:
| Right. There are countless parameters and seeds and whatnots
| to tweak. But theoretically if all the inputs are the same
| the outputs should be within Epsilon of a known good. I
| wouldn't even mandate temperature or any other parameter be a
| specific value, just that it's the same. That way you can
| make sure even the pseudorandom processes are the same, so
| long as nothing pulls from a hardware rng or something like
| that. Which seems reasonable for them to do so idk maybe an
| "insecure rng" mode
| andai wrote:
| >Temp should be effectively 0 so it's atleast deterministic
| in it's random probabilities.
|
| Is this a thing? I read an article about how due to some
| implementation detail of GPUs, you don't actually get
| deterministic outputs even with temp 0.
|
| But I don't understand that, and haven't experimented with it
| myself.
| kingstnap wrote:
| By default CUDA isn't deterministic because of thread
| scheduling.
|
| The main difference comes from rounding order of reduction
| difference.
|
| It does make a small difference. Unless you have an
| unstable floating point algorithm, but if you have an
| unstable floating point algorithm on a GPU at low precision
| you were doomed from the start.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| The even more confounding factor is there are specific builds
| provided by every vendor of these Cix P1 systems: Radxa, Orange
| Pi, Minisforum, now MetaComputing... it is painful to try to
| sort it out, as someone who knows where to look.
|
| I couldn't imagine recommending any of these boards to people
| who aren't already SBC tinkerers.
| coredog64 wrote:
| I was also onboard until he got to the NPU downsides. I don't
| care about use for an LLM, but I would like to see the ability
| to run smallish ONNX models generated from a classical ML
| workflow. Not only is a GPU overkill for the tasks I'm
| considering, but I'm also concerned that unattended GPUs out on
| the edge will be repurposed for something else (video games,
| crypto mining, or just straight up ganked)
| BirAdam wrote:
| I love that OrangePi is making good hardware, but after my
| experience with the OrangePi 5 Max, I won't be buying more
| hardware from them again. The device is largely useless due to a
| lack of software support. This also happened with the MangoPi MQ-
| Pro. I'll just stick with RPi. I may not get as much hardware for
| the money, but the software support is fantastic.
| daymanstep wrote:
| Yeah that's the problem with ARM devices. Better just buy a
| N100
| simlevesque wrote:
| The N100 is way larger than a OrangePi 5 Max.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Also about half as efficient, if that matters, and 1.5-2x
| higher idle power consumption (again, if that matters).
|
| Sometimes easier to acquire, but usually the same price or
| more expensive.
| spockz wrote:
| I can run my N100 nuc at 4W wall socket power draw idle.
| If I keep turbo boost off, it also stays there under
| normal load up to 6W full power. Then it is also terribly
| slow. With turbo boost enabled power draw can go to 8-10W
| on full load.
|
| Not sure how this compares to the OrangePI in terms of
| performance per watt but it is already pretty far into
| the area of marginal gains for me at the cost of having
| to deal with ARM, custom housing, adapters to ensure the
| wall socket draw to be efficient etc. Having an efficient
| pico psu power a pi or orange pi is also not cheap.
| daymanstep wrote:
| Which NUC do you have? A lot of the nameless brands on
| aliexpress draw 10 watts on idle.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Not the poster you're replying to, but I run an Acer
| laptop with an N305 CPU as a Plex server. Idle power draw
| with the lid closed is 4-5W and I keep the battery capped
| at 80% charge.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| There are quite a few x86-64 machines in the 70mm x 70mm
| form factor[1], which is close?
|
| 1: https://www.ecs.com.tw/en/Product/Mini-PC/LIVA_Q2/
| hebelehubele wrote:
| Lmao the hero background. They photoshopped the pc into
| the back pocket of that AI-generated woman. (or the
| entire thing is AI-generated)
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I have an even cheesier competitor, which randomly has a
| dragon on the lid (it would be a terrible choice for all
| but the wimpiest casual gaming... but it makes a good
| Home Assistant HAOS server!)
| 867-5309 wrote:
| welcome to online shopping..
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well... https://radxa.com/products/x/x4/
|
| It has major overheating issues though, the N100 was never
| meant to be put on such a tiny PCB.
| nine_k wrote:
| They also sell a heatsink for mere $21 (on AliExpress),
| just in case you don't know how to fit a spare PC cooler
| onto it.
| severino wrote:
| I thought N100 equivalent SBC computers like Radxa's, etc.,
| were largely out of stock for quite some time now.
| kombine wrote:
| I was planning to build a NAS from OPi 5 to minimise power
| consumption, but ended up going for a Zen 3 Ryzen CPU and
| having zero regrets. The savings are miniscule and would not
| justify the costs.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The device is largely useless due to a lack of software
| support.
|
| I think everyone considering an SBC should be warned that none
| of these are going to be supported by upstream in the way a
| cheap Intel or AMD desktop will be.
|
| Even the Raspberry Pi 5, one of the most well supported of the
| SBCs, is still getting trickles of mainline support.
|
| The trend of buying SBCs for general purpose compute is
| declining, thankfully, as more people come to realize that
| these are not the best options for general purpose computing.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > The trend of buying SBCs for general purpose compute is
| declining,
|
| Were people actually doing that?
| notRobot wrote:
| Have you taken a look at armbian? If so, what was your
| experience?
|
| https://www.armbian.com/boards?vendor=xunlong
| adrianwaj wrote:
| One or two USB-C 3.2 Gen2 ports are all that's required - can
| then plug in a hub or dock. eg:
| https://us.ugreen.com/collections/usb-hub?sort_by=price-desc...
|
| Can also plug in a power bank.
| https://us.ugreen.com/collections/power-bank?sort_by=price-d...
|
| The advantage is that if the machine breaks or is upgraded, the
| dock and pb can be retained. Would also distribute the price.
|
| The dock and pb can also be kept away to lower heat to avoid a
| fan in the housing, ideally.
|
| Better hardware should end up leading to better software - its
| main problem right now.
|
| This 10-in-1 dock even has an SSD enclosure for $80
| https://us.ugreen.com/products/ugreen-10-in-1-usb-c-hub-ssd (no
| affiliation) (no drivers required)
|
| I'd have another dock/power/screen combo for traveling and
| portable use.
| james-clef wrote:
| Something in me wants to buy every SBC and/or microcontroller
| that is advertised to me.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Yeah I have this problem (?) too. They are just so neat. I also
| really like tiny laptops and recreations of classic computers.
| junon wrote:
| Clockwork Pi if you haven't seen it. Beautiful little
| constructions.
| 3abiton wrote:
| Even though all can be replaced by a decent mini pc with beefy
| memory, with lots of VMs.
| zzzoom wrote:
| At some point SBCs that require a custom linux image will become
| unacceptable, right?
|
| Right?
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| "Custom"? No.
|
| Proprietary and closed? One can hope.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| There are some projects to port UEFI to boards like Orange Pi
| and Raspberry Pi. You can install a normal OS once you have
| flashed that.
|
| https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/master/Plat...
|
| https://github.com/edk2-porting/edk2-rk3588
| ajb wrote:
| There also seems to be a plan to add uefi support to
| u-boot[1]. Many of these kinds of boards have u-boot
| implementations, so could then boot uefi kernel.
|
| However many of these ARM chips have their own sub-
| architecture in the Linux source tree, I'm not sure that it's
| possible today to build a single image with them all built in
| and choose the subarchitecture at runtime. Theoretically it
| could be done, of course, but who has the incentive to do
| that work?
|
| (I seem to remember Linus complaining about this situation to
| the Arm maintainer, maybe 10-20 years ago)
|
| [1] https://docs.u-boot.org/en/v2021.04/uefi/uefi.html
| Aurornis wrote:
| Using vendor kernels is standard in embedded development.
| Upstreaming takes a long time so even among well-supported
| boards you either have to wait many years for everything to get
| upstreamed or find a board where the upstreamed kernel supports
| enough peripherals that you're not missing anything you need.
|
| I think it's a good thing that people are realizing that these
| SBCs are better used as development tools for people who
| understand embedded dev instead of as general purpose PCs. For
| years now you can find comments under every Raspberry Pi or
| other SBC thread informing everyone that a mini PC is a better
| idea for general purpose compute unless you really need
| something an SBC offers, like specific interfaces or low power.
| apatheticonion wrote:
| I have always found it perplexing. Why is that required?
|
| Is it the lack of drivers in upstream? Is it something to do
| with how ARM devices seemingly can't install Linux the same
| way x86 machines can (something something device tree)?
| mort96 wrote:
| Somehow, this isn't a problem in the desktop space, even
| though new hardware regularly gets introduced there too which
| require new drivers.
| doubled112 wrote:
| x86 hardware has a standard way to boot and bring up the
| hardware, usually to at least a minimum level of
| functionality.
|
| ARM devices aren't even really similar to one another. As a
| weird example, the Raspberry Pi boots from the GPU, which
| brings up the rest of the hardware.
| ThrowawayB7 wrote:
| The "somehow" is Microsoft, who defines what the hardware
| architecture of what a x86-64 desktop/laptop/server is and
| builds the compatibility test suite (Windows HLK) to verify
| conformance. Open source operating systems rely on
| Microsoft's standardization.
| megous wrote:
| Or you can just upstream what you need yourself.
| parl_match wrote:
| > At some point SBCs that require a custom linux image will
| become unacceptable, right?
|
| The flash images contain information used by the bios to
| configure and bring up the device. It's more than just a
| filesystem. Just because it's not the standard consoomer "bios
| menu" you're used to doesn't mean it's wrong. It's just
| different.
|
| These boards are based off of solutions not generally made
| available to the public. As a result, they require a small
| amount of technical knowledge beyond what operating a consumer
| PC might require.
|
| So, packaging a standard arm linux install into a "custom"
| image is perfectly fine, to be honest.
| jonpalmisc wrote:
| Looks like the SoC (CIX P1) has Cortex-A720/A520 cores which are
| Armv9.2, nice.
|
| I've still been on the hunt for a cheap Arm board with a Armv8.3+
| or Arvm9.0+ SoC for OSDev stuff, but it's hard to find them in
| hobbyist price range (this board included, $700-900 USD from what
| I see).
|
| The NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nanos looked good but unfortunately
| SWD/JTAG is disabled unless you pay for the $2k model...
| timschumi wrote:
| And it doesn't seem like anything newer than ARMv9.2 is
| available either, no matter the price point.
| preisschild wrote:
| Unfortunately only available atm for extremely high prices. I'd
| like to pick some up to create a ceph cluster (with 1x 18tb hdd
| osd per node in an 8 node cluster with 4+2 erasure coding)
| ggdxwz wrote:
| This seems to be an overkill for most of my workloads that
| require an SBC. I would choose Jetson for anything
| computationally intensive, as Orange Pi 6 Plus's NPU is not even
| utilized due to lack of software support. For other workloads,
| this one seems a bit too large in terms of formfactor and power
| consumption, and older RK3588 should still be sufficient
| youngNed wrote:
| I'm a big fan of raspberry pi, I have many, in fact I have so
| many I have:
|
| ``` alias findpi='sudo nmap -sP 192.168.1.0/24 | awk
| '\''/^Nmap/{ip=$NF}/B8:27:EB|DC:A6:32|E4:5F:01|28:CD:C1/{print
| ip}'\''' ```
|
| On every `.bashrc` i have.
|
| But I just don't get... everything, I don't get the org, I don't
| get the users on hn, I'm like skinner in the 'no the kids are
| wrong' meme.
|
| It's a lambda. It's a cheap, plug in, ssh, forget. And it's
| bloody wonderful.
|
| If you buy a 1 or 2 off ebay, ok maybe a 3.
|
| After that? Get a damn computer.
|
| Want more bandwidth on the rj45? Get a computer.
|
| Want faster usb? Get a computer.
|
| Want ssd? Get a computer
|
| Want a retro computing device? Get a computer.
|
| Want a computer experience? Etc etc etc, i don't need to labour
| this.
|
| Want something that will sit there, have ssh and run python
| scripts for years without a reboot? Spend 20 quid on ebay.
|
| People demanded faster horses. And the raspi org, for some, damn
| fool, reason, tried to give them.
|
| There are people bemoaning the fact that raspberry pi's aren't
| able to run LLM's. And will then, without irony, complain that
| the prices are too high. For the love of God, raspi org, stop
| listening to dickheads on the Internet. Stop paying youtubers to
| shill. Stop and focus.
|
| You won't win this game
| geerlingguy wrote:
| TFA is about an Orange Pi, with a 12-core Arm chip, a bit more
| than a Raspberry Pi.
| youngNed wrote:
| They are chasing the same waterfalls though jeff
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