
First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 - deviceguru
http://hackerboards.com/first-64-bit-orange-pi-slips-in-under-20/
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matt_wulfeck
What all of these mini computers need is modular, high speed persistent
storage. They all use SD, which is sooooo slow as to be unusable.

I've seen a few boards which take eMMc but they are few and far between, and
require special (proprietary to the board) hardware to be installed on the
eMMC chip.

Even still I'm not sure the bus would even provide much IO bandwidth. Storage
is an area that needs a lot more improvement for mini computers.

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brians
I suspect we'll see cheap storage before modular storage. If there's 64 GB
onboard and nearly as fast as RAM, it's easier to live with the rest of the
world being on the other side of a USB interface.

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matt_wulfeck
I would kill for that kind of onboard storage. Even 4 or 8 GB would be great
with an SD expansion slot for additional storage.

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BrandoElFollito
The C.H.I.P has this. I am waiting for the two I ordered to ship (3 months
late).

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Damogran6
Sure wish they'd roll out something with two (possibly three) RJ-45's. Gig
ethernet is nice here, but if they had multiple ethernet, they'd crack the
SOHO firewall market WIDE open.

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technofiend
You may want to examine uquiti's low end edgerouter products. They run their
own version of debian with some blob drivers for packet offloading, but you
can add your own packages or even load a different distribution if you desire.
Heck OpenBSD runs on it so presumably other BSDs do as well. .

~~~
Damogran6
I'm not seeing it on their website...and there are several multi-interface
open source routers out there...but when I checked last, they were in the
$200+ range...an rPI would have more than enough HP to handle the job...it
just doesn't have a good multi-interface solution...it'd cost...what, $40?

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mrbill
Edgerouter X runs around $50, and the Edgerouter Lite is under $100 ($88
currently on Amazon). Both run Ubiquiti's fork of Vyatta/VyOS on top of
Debian, on MIPS-based CPUs.

[https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-EdgeRouter-Advanced-
Gigabit-...](https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-EdgeRouter-Advanced-Gigabit-
Ethernet/dp/B00YFJT29C)

[https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Edgerouter-
ERLITE-3-Desktop-...](https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Edgerouter-
ERLITE-3-Desktop-Router/dp/B00HXT8EKE)

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woodruffw
What's going on with the IC placement[1]? I'm not at all familiar with board
layout/design, but it looks like they've wasted a fair amount of space by
putting the CPU and (what I'm guessing are) memory chips at those odd angles.

[1]:
[http://files.linuxgizmos.com/shenzhen_orangepipctwo2.jpg](http://files.linuxgizmos.com/shenzhen_orangepipctwo2.jpg)

~~~
phs2501
It almost certainly saves space as the odd placement would be to optimize
signal routing. You need a fair amount of space around a BGA to fan out all
the signals, and at $20 they certainly have tried to do this with the minimum
number of PCB layers possible which makes the routing problem much harder.

That being said it does look really strange.

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makomk
That figures. The previous version of this is almost supported in the upstream
Linux kernel, so I guess we're probably due for a new model.

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megous
Orange Pi PC works perfectly well with mainstream kernel + a few patches.
Ethernet, HDMI, frequency scaling. Audio is also in the works.

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ars
Is this related to the well known Raspberry Pi?

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eberkund
It is a similar product (an ARM based single-board computer) but other than
that there is no relation.

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thinkmassive
It also features a "40-pin RPi interface" so it seems fair to consider it a
partial clone, or at least a knockoff.

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ryao
I am visiting China. It turns out to be cheaper to buy this from aliexpress
than it is to buy it in China. :/

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Scaevolus
Does this actually have a 64-bit kernel to run on it? The Raspberry Pi 3 has a
64-bit CPU, but no way to actually use it as such! There are some efforts to
produce a 64-bit kernel for it, but it's not yet generally usable.

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yuhong
I wonder how much space is in between the DRAM chips and the capacitors.

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hinkley
Do none of the devices in this class support Ethernet over HDMI (HEC)?

