The makers of the Orange Pi line of single-board computers have announced a new model with a Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core processor, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, and USB ports, support for up to 4GB of RAM and optional support for a 16GB eMMC module as well as a microSD card reader and USB ports for storage.
It’s called the Orange Pi 4 LTS, and it’s expected to go on sale in mid-February with prices ranging from $55 to $70.
While the RK3399 processor is a bit on the older side at this point, it’s a reasonably well-supported processor that was widely used in Chromebooks a few years ago, and which powers a number of Linux-friendly devices including Pine64’s PineBook Pro laptop and the new PinePhone Pro smartphone. It’s also a chip that Orange Pi has used in the older Orange Pi 4 which has similar specs, but a slightly different design and set of features.
The chip features two ARM Cortex-A72 CPU cores, four ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores and ARM Mali-T860MP4 graphics and Orange Pi says the new board will support operating systems including Ubunt, Debian, and Android.
Measuring 91 x 56mm (3.58″ x 2.2″), the Orange Pi 4 LTS is a little larger than a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, which measures 85 x 56mm (3.35″ x 2.2″), but it’s still a pretty compact and versatile mini computer or development board with USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 Type-A ports, a USB 3.0 Type-C port, a 24-pin mini PCIe connector, a 26-pin GPIO header, dedicated connectors that can be used for cameras and/or LCD displays, and a power jack for a 5V/3A DC power supply.
According to a graphic released by Orange Pi, there’s room on the board for two LPDDR4 memory modules available in 1.5 GB or 2GB versions, suggesting the board may be available in 3GB and 4GB variants.
The Orange Pi 4 LTS should be available from Amazon and from the Shenzhen Xunlong Software store on AliExpress in mid-February.
The RK3399 may be an older chip, but don’t its benchmarks blow ones previously used in single-board computers out of the water? It’s 30% faster than the Intel Atom x5-z8500 in my old Kangaroo in single-thread performance and 70% higher in its overall score — what can’t this computer do? Looks like one could put this in a case and have a machine comparable in capability to the many mini systems with an Intel J4125 at about half the price.
It’s decent in theory, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Most of these ARM SBCs are unable to really take full advantage of their GPUs due to no Linux drivers. This may be less of an issue with Android. These boards can still do many things, but as a replacement for x86 Intel or AMD low-power mini PCs it’s not so straightforward. These tend to be more for tinkerers and it’s worth knowing what you’re getting into. You have more flexibility with OS and other software with x86 units. There are other ARM boards with chips that caught up to this one in terms of performance. Raspberry Pi 4 doesn’t have quite the same GPU driver issues as the others because of its Broadcom SoC, though I’m not sure if it’s as smooth an experience as the Pi 3 seemed to be.
I thought that most of the SBCs supported one or more Linuxes. The Mali-T860 appears to have Linux drivers; I found this reference from 2015: https://www.cnx-software.com/2015/02/23/arm-releases-kernel-drivers-for-mali-t880-t860-gpus-user-space-drivers-for-mali-t76x-gpus/. Since device drivers are part of the Linux kernel and Android is a derivative, I should think that any system supporting Android with a Linux compiled for it would have GPU driver support.
The Mali GPUs have always been an issue with Linux on SBCs. Some boards end up more usable than others. If you look in the comments in the link you provided, you’ll see a few people describe the driver situation like I mentioned. That is from 2015, so it’s possible things are better now with the T860 GPU. “ExplainingComputers” on Youtube seemed to have a good experience with the Rock Pi 4C, another RK3399 board, when that came out with what appeared to be good Youtube playback, which can be an issue on some boards. To put it in perspective, there are projects such as Panfrost to attempt to reverse engineer graphics drivers because of the poor Mali support. Of course, that takes time and I don’t know the state of that. I never picked up any of the RK3399 boards so I can’t provide first-hand experience with it, but from the boards I have used and from things I’ve heard, there are typically issues because of the GPU situation. Depending on the use case, the issues may not be big. My main point is that if you are interested, take a good look at reviews and forum posts so you know what to expect. Expecting it to be smooth and straightforward like an x86 machine is usually a mistake.
Here’s a quote from mid 2020 from a moderator on the Pine forums about a product with the RK3399 that describes my understanding of things: “If the underlying reason for your questions are about the GPU performance, the Pinebook Pro is likely not for you.
It performs well for most desktop tasks. Some of the general or video acceleration is not complete in all distros.
Even though the RockChip RK3399 has been out for a while, the Linux kernel work is still on-going for both CPU and
the GPU.”
Interesting.
is any lcd workig device for this?
compatibility without patch on linux
still have ethernet/wifi/bt blobs? without modyfication and can change firmware?
this is hardware spy ;(