
64-bit Orange Pi – A Quad Core Computer for $20 - piyush_soni
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/06/the-new-64-bit-orange-pi-is-a-quad-core-computer-for-20/
======
whyagaindavid
They have dismal linux support. Old kernels; and no releases. Poor video
drivers.

[http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=238060](http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=238060)

the current lubuntu image does not even exist.

[http://www.orangepi.org/downloadresources/PiPlus2e/2016-06-0...](http://www.orangepi.org/downloadresources/PiPlus2e/2016-06-06/piplus2e_283fd175b5088ab3a61f92aec50.html)

~~~
aeruder
I don't understand why they go through so much effort to churn out these
boards that are made useless by lack of upstreaming.

Oh, wait, because idiots like me keep buying them and finding this out too
late. Thanks for saving me $20 this time.

~~~
ajross
> I don't understand why they go through so much effort to churn out these
> boards that are made useless by lack of upstreaming.

Because the board vendor, generally, doesn't know any more about this stuff
than you do. They buy an SoC from a manufacturer (Allwinner in this case) and
drop it on the board. Whatever "Linux" BSP the vendor provides then gets
hacked into form for their product and shipped. They aren't really in any sane
position to take maintainership of this code or upstream it on their own.

And going further, Allwinner is themselves just assembling IP blocks from
other vendors (companies like ARM and Synopsys) that they don't completely
understand. They get a sample driver, drop it in a tree, fix bugs, and ship
it.

It's a big mess. The bigger vendors (e.g. Intel and Qualcomm) do a decent job
of putting together solid BSPs (even if they don't always play well with the
community -- the packages received by board vendors usually work and come with
solid docs). The little guys just aren't there yet.

~~~
revelation
They buy enough of them to get a datasheet. Just releasing that would be
enough.

~~~
ajross
The datasheet is a copyrighted document received under NDA. They literally
can't.

And again, a datasheet from Allwinner is going to just tell you what the
instantiation parameters for all the various IPs are. To write a driver for, I
dunno, the I2C controller (or whatever, I know nothing about this SoC in
particular) you're going to need a Synopsys databook or something.

There's a framework in place for distributing all that stuff between OEMs and
first-tier customers. But with the exception of a handful of hardware vendors,
no one's ever cared about getting it out to the public.

------
kogepathic
> and a standalone graphics chip

So, having the GPU on the same SoC qualifies as "standalone" now?

So any Intel with iGP also has a "standalone" graphics chip?

Or is this Tech Crunch writer just clueless?

> physical power switch

No. It has a GPIO mapped button that can be used for soft power down. The
original Orange Pi has the same button and to my knowledge it can only be used
to turn the board off. The board powers on as soon as power is applied.

------
megous
So much negativity and misinformation here. Orange PI PC boards are well
designed, with attention to things that many other board makers fail at, like
heat spreading, space for heat sink (you don't really need one usually),
quality DC connector, fine grained CPU voltage regulation, USB not being
crippled by on-board hub, etc.

Mainline support is also progressing well. With some patches you can get
temperature regulation, HDMI support, audio support now on mainline kernel.

Video decoding is also progressing as someone noted in other comments.

SoC on Orange PI PC is also very nice for people who care about not having
binary blobs running show on some hidden internal processor. There is
additional OpenRISC CPU on the SoC, but it doesn't run by default on mainline
kernel, and you can also program it yourself, without too much trouble.

Armbian supports these boards quite well, including video decoding support.

Allwinner is also not that bad at releasing code/datasheets. They release a
lot of code. The issue is that it is designed for old kernels (3.4, 3.10) so
it's not directly usable/easily portable to newer kernels. But still it is
helpful and community is actively working on mainlining the support for
various SoC parts.

Orange PI PC (H3 soc) is quite usable as a desktop for web browsing and
audio/video playback.

I'm glad to see H5, because it looks like performance wise it will be still
better and I'm also optimistic about the open source software support in the
future. It certainly is a very motivating board to develop for at the current
price/performance level.

The only annoying thing I find is Mali GPU.

~~~
camperman
"Mainline support is also progressing well. With some patches you can get
temperature regulation, HDMI support, audio support now on mainline kernel."

Patches to get HDMI and audio? More work needed I think.

"Video decoding is also progressing as someone noted in other comments."

So it doesn't work out of the box then?

"SoC on Orange PI PC is also very nice for people who care about not having
binary blobs running show on some hidden internal processor."

AllWinner is a GPL violator: [http://linux-
sunxi.org/GPL_Violations](http://linux-sunxi.org/GPL_Violations)

"Allwinner is also not that bad at releasing code/datasheets. They release a
lot of code. The issue is that it is designed for old kernels (3.4, 3.10) so
it's not directly usable/easily portable to newer kernels. But still it is
helpful and community is actively working on mainlining the support for
various SoC parts."

Allwinner does NOT cooperate with the linux-sunxi community. At all.

"The only annoying thing I find is Mali GPU."

That's just the final peanut on the turd I think.

~~~
ssvb
"So it doesn't work out of the box then?"

Video decoding acceleration does work on A10/A20/H3 with the legacy 3.4 kernel
out of the box. I believe that you can even find some ready made SD card
images. And you can track the mainlining effort at [https://linux-
sunxi.org/Sunxi-cedrus](https://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi-cedrus)

"AllWinner is a GPL violator"

You are just cherry-picking statements and severely exaggerating them. Every
major hardware vendor has its own skeletons in a closet. Maybe you can
remember Linus Torvald's middle finger to NVIDIA and things like this.
Allwinner is definitely not a saint, but is still far from the worst. If you
want to vent out your hatred, then I can give you some better targets.

"Allwinner does NOT cooperate with the linux-sunxi community. At all."

This is not exactly true. They are at least providing the documentation and
also their open source code drops. Some people (mainly the devboard
manufacturers) have contacts with Allwinner.

------
kozak
Is this layout an output of some optimization algorithm that computationally
finds the best layout without considering non-relevant constraints like human
aesthetics? Or are we used to "perpendicular" layouts simply because assembly
machines weren't able to rotate components like that?

~~~
afandian
I don't know, but if I were responsible for layout, that's the kind of thing
I'd do. I think it looks great. I wonder if this design makes PNP more
expensive.

~~~
DanBC
It might increase the cost of the one-off programming.

~~~
janoc
Which gets exported from the PCB CAD package anyway as a pick & place file,
with correct orientations.

------
MarkusWandel
It's a question of expectations. Me, I want a cheap, wifi-capable motion
sensing camera on my LAN, behind a firewall, not on the public internet.

So I ordered the Orange Pi Lite and its camera module, altogether a smidgen
less than $30 Canadian (a current model Raspberry Pi will set you back $50+
around here, and then another $10 or so for the camera module (or a clone of
it) from China.

Not impressed initially. Not much documentation, so how do you know you even
got it powered up right? No lights come on, no video signal comes out,
nothing. Eventually hooked up a TTL USB/serial converter to the GND/TX/RX
three-pin connector and hallelujah, it did boot and let me log in and set up
wifi remote login. The only thing I found that booted was the Lite-specific
Armbian distribution and yes, it uses a 3.4.x kernel, and I still haven't
managed to get any HDMI output.

But on the plus side, "motion" was cinch to configure, works great with the
camera in 800x600 mode (CPU temperature 43 degrees Celsius with no heat sink,
board out in the open at room temperature) or 1600x1200 mode (CPU temperature
about 48 degrees Celsius). That load also includes a script which periodically
rsyncs the collected pictures to a server, and cleans up (I use /tmp in RAM
disk to avoid SD card wear).

Happy? You bet. I'll probably order a couple more. Use this for direct
internet facing stuff? No. Use this for general purpose computing where every
feature has to work and the CPU performance is absolutely maximized? No. But
for the specific application I want it for, peachy keen. At least it's been
stable in two days of running and over a gigabyte of pictures taken and saved.

I've also got a Raspi and its camera module. All in all, the experience with
the Raspi isn't any better, though the camera sure is, and now you can get an
8MP camera too (the OPi's camera is 2MP).

~~~
jandrese
I don't know about the Orange Pi directly, but one of the other Allwinner
boards I tried would only output on the HDMI if the display negotiated HDCP.
So you had to hook it to a TV, not a computer monitor, to get the picture.

In general if you want something that just works, the Raspberry Pi is a much
safer bet. These alternate boards always seem to have something stupid you
have to fix before they work properly.

~~~
MarkusWandel
True, it's not a safe bet, but at the price it's a fun experiment. I've now
concluded after further playing with mine that 1600x1200 mode effectively
doesn't work (you get a picture, but it's mirrored horizontally and auto
brightness/contrast doesn't work). Still at 800x600 good for the price.

------
pi-rat
Not for people with OCD, that's an interesting board layout :)

~~~
jon-wood
I dread to think how long it took to lay that out, but I'm pretty impressed. A
lesser person would have just given up and used a larger PCB, but they were
clearly determined to fit everything in the same footprint as a Raspberry PI.

~~~
userbinator
It may have been routed with
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopoR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopoR)

~~~
Gracana
That was my thought as well, but the traces don't look like TopoR traces.

------
tobiaswk
Yes they are cheap... but their hardware has a high fault-rate. Hardware
support is there but the software support is crappy at best. Allwinners SoC's
pretty much have zero support in the open source community. They use old
kernels. You will be running old kernels and graphics drivers. Also... the old
Orange Pi SoC got notoriously hot. 60-75 degress celcius. You needed an active
cooler or very big passive one. Lets not forget the ridiculous patched kernel
by Allwinner. They forgot to remove their "debug" code which basically allowed
total control over devices shipped with the kernel;
[http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1108-security-
alert...](http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1108-security-alert-for-
allwinner-
sun8i-h3a83th8/http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1108-security-alert-
for-allwinner-sun8i-h3a83th8/)

I'd be very causcius about using this SBC. Sure it's fine for fiddling around.
You're better of with ODroid.

------
chx
It's Allwinner. Nothing to see here, move along.

~~~
na85
Care to elaborate?

~~~
simosx
Some person from linux-sunxi made it his life mission to crucify Allwinner
because they (Allwinner) messed up with some Linux kernel tarballs. What you
have been reading is the result of this campaign against Allwinner.

1\. Allwinner used to distribute Linux kernel tarballs with several device
drivers in binary-only (object) files. They were in the correct place and you
could recompile the kernel. Those binary .o files would be used so that you
could complete the compilation. Such an example is the Mali driver and others
that Allwinner did not make an effort to get the rights to redistribute in
source. Obviously, this is a GPL violation.

So, how do you deal with this issue? Do you get Allwinner to release the
source of the Mali GPU driver due to the GPL violation? :-). Some people
wanted to play lawyers and would mess up ANY action unless Allwinner complied
fully by releasing source code to things that they did not have a licence (to
release source).

2\. Allwinner released officially the source of the 3.4 kernel for a range of
SoCs (A10 to A83, the H5 should be similar to one of the A?? SoCs):
[https://github.com/allwinner-
zh/linux-3.4-sunxi](https://github.com/allwinner-zh/linux-3.4-sunxi)

Documentation: [https://github.com/allwinner-
zh/documents](https://github.com/allwinner-zh/documents) Bootloader code:
[https://github.com/allwinner-zh/bootloader](https://github.com/allwinner-
zh/bootloader)

A few months ago, there was a discussion on LKML on how to deal with GPL
violations. Linus and Greg said that being aggressive in pursuing the GPL
violations really does not help. Here is an example where it did not help.

~~~
libv
You again...

In both 1 and 2, there are a varying amount of blobs spread around kernel
tarballs and even kernel git repositories, and Allwinner has been made aware
of those being in violation with the GPL quite a numerous amount of time.

Has allwinner gone and resolved all of these issue in the meantime (which is
only a brief timeperiod measured in, oh, i don't know, 3 years)? No. At best
they did a few but only increased the number of blobs upon every new kernel
release.

Stop your nonsense, besides it just being inane, it is quite perpendicular to
the truth.

\--libv (simosx's bestest friend in the whole world).

~~~
simosx
So this is the person I was talking about. Hey, libv!

First, libv does not get what is being said, for example, in
[https://lwn.net/Articles/698452/](https://lwn.net/Articles/698452/) The
situation with Allwinner fits quite well with what Greg and Linus talk about.

Second, libv as a business person sucks bigly. He was being a PITA to
Allwinner and, from what I deduced, would then propose to them to make the
problem go away (develop himself the software) for quite some money.

------
_joel
Having been burnt several times buying 'cheap' SoC's like these and then
spending hours trying to get them working due to crappy upstream support then
I'd steer clear of this. If you value your time and don't want to get out SPI
interfaces and the like to debug something then save your time and
subsequently money, buy a Pi3.

Side note: One vendor (Pine64) even shipped binary images in a RAR format. I'm
not sure why this was chosen, but makes you wonder how they got to that
decision and if they spent much time working with 'proper' distro's for
embedded, where nothing is shipped as a RAR but gz/bz/xz whatever

------
ChuckMcM
I'm really surprised the naming types for the Arm8 (64 bit) low cost boards
didn't call them 'Tau' rather than 'Pi', and 'Orange Tau' or 'Dragon Tau'
sounds reasonably identifiable to me and it would quickly become the defacto
way of distinguishing between 64 bit machines and 32 bit machines.

------
virmundi
I'm a little confused. Hopefully HN can teach me. At 1 GB isn't the 64-bit
detrimental? I thought 64-bit addressing cost about 5-10% of performance, but
didn't matter since the system has hundreds of more MB of RAM.

I guess this makes sure it runs on more modern operating systems. I thought
that most still support 32-bit.

~~~
brudgers
64 bits means bigger integers before overflow, wraparound or whatever. Big
ints may be useful when working with big data. It also means double precision
floating point will tend to be faster. That may be useful in signal processing
applications.

All that said, mainly the board is 64b because popular recent versions of the
ARM core are 64b. The Raspberry Pi 3 is also 64b but Raspbian Linux typically
comes as 32b...or at least did last I looked.

~~~
paulmd
32-bit refers to the memory addressing. There's nothing that says that a
32-bit processor has to have 32-bit instructions, 32-bit ALU, etc. And most
32-bit processors are perfectly capable of working with long-int/double types.

Assuming the processor is otherwise identical, 64-bit addressing on a SoC with
1 GB of RAM doesn't do anything except waste memory on an excessive address
space.

~~~
monocasa
You're right in the abstract sense, but we're talking in the context of
AArch64 vs. AArch32.

------
singularity2001
Anyone worried about the device coming from China? What's even the name of the
Chinese NSA analogous backdoor specialist? "Party"?

~~~
todd8
I would be after this incident with the manufacturer:
[http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/05/chinese-arm-
vendor-l...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/05/chinese-arm-vendor-left-
developer-backdoor-in-kernel-for-android-pi-devices/)

Although no state actor would leave in a kernel backdoor that is opened with
"rootmydevice" as the magic word.

~~~
cabalamat
Indeed. I expect the backdoor is in the chip anyway, not the kernel.

------
paulftw
While really awesome on specs and price, downside of these boards is dev tools
and community support. They are getting better at it and very fast, but living
on the cutting edge is not pleasant.

~~~
janoc
That's the biggest problem with these boards, not just OrangePi, but most of
of these SBCs. The ecosystem and development support leaves a lot to be
desired. The community size is not comparable with what Raspbery Pi has and it
shows.

I have the original BananaPi and unless you are willing to do a lot of Linux
hacking, it is most often not worth the hassle over RasPi. E.g. in the case of
this Orange Pi most people don't need the 64bit performance, moreover the
board still has only 1GB of RAM, so the advantage of a 64bit CPU being able to
access more RAM is not going to be used here.

Yes, Raspberry Pi is slower, doesn't have all the cool peripherals, but the
ecosystem is much better. A fast CPU means little if you can't get a driver
that you need working or a kernel hasn't been ported to your board ... Having
to hunt stuff down on some Chinese forum is not fun.

------
thresh
Can it run stock vanilla mainline kernel?

It really sucks to be stuck with ancient 3.14 kernel on quite powerful things
like Odroid C2.

~~~
whyagaindavid
The Orange Pi range are based on Allwinner SoCs which have poor Open Source
drivers for the VPU (the bit of the SoC that actually plays video). There have
been a number of attempts to improve this, and all so far have failed. All
winner don't really seem to be that interested in working with Kodi devs to
sort this, and apparently have a patchy history with open source licence
compliance.
[http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=238060](http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=238060)

~~~
homarp
The VPU is getting there: [http://free-electrons.com/blog/support-for-the-
allwinner-vpu...](http://free-electrons.com/blog/support-for-the-allwinner-
vpu-in-the-mainline-linux-kernel/)

"Currently, the combination of the kernel driver and VA-API backend supports
MPEG2 and MPEG4 decoding only. There is for the moment no support for
encoding, and no support for H264, though we believe support for both aspects
can be added within the architecture of the existing driver and VA-API
backend."

------
bdz
I still think that Odroid is a better choice, both over this and RBPI

[http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php](http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php)

~~~
Brakenshire
How is Odroid for open source drivers?

------
Animats
The board layout looks strange. All those odd angles. It looks like someone
copied partial layouts from other projects and crammed them into the available
space. I wonder what board design program they use.

Can this be used for ZCash mining? (Never mind, ZCash is down 95% from the
peak 9 days ago.[1])

[1]
[https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/zcash/](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/zcash/)

------
annnnd
> 64-bit ...

Does anyone know, is this "RaspberryPi-like 64-bit" or real 64-bit? That is,
is there a compatible 64-bit kernel available with all the drivers?

------
linker3000
There's useful insight into some of the SoC-based boards on Pete Scargill's
IoT site chronicalling his gadget and MQTT-based work; it's well worth a
browse...

[http://tech.scargill.net/](http://tech.scargill.net/)

------
sorenjan
How come there aren't any Raspberry Pi competitors using Intel Atom CPUs?
There's plenty of cheap tablets running Windows 10 on Intel Atom on Aliexpress
and similar, remove the screen and battery and it should be doable at an
affordable price, no?

~~~
benwilber0
I think it's mainly price point. It's hard to sell a $40-50 board equipped
with an Atom CPU. Also I think they had heat issues at one point?

------
marmaduke
I first thought, oh noes I just got a RPi3, but then reading the specs I see
it's not very different? USB2, 1GB RAM, A53, why would I (two weeks ago before
ordering the Rpi) order this instead?

~~~
m45t3r
Gigabyte Ethernet for one, if you are using this in a project where Ethernet
bandwidth is a problem, this would perform much better.

I actually want one of those RPi clones exactly because RPi performs so poor
in I/O applications, since all external bandwidth is shared by __one __USB 2.0
HUB (including the Ethernet port, and more recently, Wi-Fi /Bluetooth). I use
my RPi as a media server/torrent client, and it is severe limited in those
situations.

~~~
nodesocket
As I understand, even adding a 1000M port to the RPi3 would not increase the
network bandwidth. The limiting factor is bus and cpu. My RPi3 Model B maxes
out from speedtest.net at around 91Mbps. From my iMac I get 180Mbps (throttled
from my provider) not the Mac.

~~~
janoc
No, it won't - because the ethernet on RPi is actually going over USB. The CPU
doesn't have a built-in ethernet peripheral. So adding a gigabyte port would
be pointless - the bottleneck would still be the USB bus.

~~~
pja
The data rate over USB2 after accounting for overheads is a lot faster than
100Mbit, so it’s not entirely pointless - you would be able to serve cache
files faster for instance. But as soon as you have anything else hitting that
bus, your real world bandwidth is going to be < 100MBit.

Since 1G is more power hungry than 100MBit interfaces as well IIRC you can
understand why the Pi people decided to stick with 100MBit.

------
nirav72
Without good marketing and community support..this thing will be DOA like many
other boards that tried to take on the RaspberryPi in the past few years.

------
edblarney
I love the PI movement. It's the essence of creative hobbyists.

Anyone walking in my company who owns a PI ... I would be inclined to hire on
the spot.

~~~
pjc50
I love it too. And because I love Raspberry Pi, I'd like to point out that
Orange Pi are nothing to do with Raspberry Pi and are infringing on their
trademarks. Raspberry Pi purchases fund their Foundation, which produces
educational material for and liases with UK schools.

~~~
k__
So buyers from other countries subsidize UK education?

~~~
pjc50
To a small extent, yes?

------
rcarmo
Specs are OK. I am waiting for these dev boards to break the 2GB RAM barrier
around this price point to update my home cluster, though :)

~~~
voltagex_
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/874883570/marvell-
espre...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/874883570/marvell-espressobin-
board) for one that'll actually have vendor support and a chance of
mainlining.

~~~
FilterSweep
This is very interesting. the $79 price point is for the 2GB RAM model - and
seems worthwhile with other accessories options provided.

The one concern I have with this board is that it ships in March 2017, which
is getting very close to the next iteration of RPi4/Odroid C3, and that it
opted for more LAN/WAN instead of adding more USB 2.0/3.0 Ports like the
Odroid/RPI.

Many thanks for giving me something to heavily consider this next week for SBC
projects though....

~~~
yuhong
I wonder what DRAM chips they are using.

------
AstroJetson
lots of prior psts on this

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12887229](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12887229)

and about the smaller board

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12876017](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12876017)

------
tiredwired
How much smaller would it be if it only had 1 USB-C connector instead of all
the other connectors?

~~~
dexterdog
Probably not possible to do and sell for $20

~~~
jandrese
They would probably have to charge $1700 for it if they did that.

------
amelius
What does it cost per FLOPShour? Does it make sense to replace my GPU for a
rack with these units?

------
jlebrech
is there a circuit design app that'll compress a design into a smaller
footprint like that?

------
phyushin
Does it bug anyone else that the chips aren't aligned to the board

~~~
brink
I like it. Especially if it's a more efficient layout. (I don't know if it
actually is.)

------
phyushin
It bothers me that the chips aren't in line with the board

------
VMG
I'd rather have onboard wifi than onboard ethernet...

~~~
pi-rat
There's a lite version without ethernet:
[https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Orange-Pi-Lite-Support-
ubunt...](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Orange-Pi-Lite-Support-ubuntu-linux-
and-android-mini-PC-Beyond-and-Compatible-with-
Raspberry/32662738571.html?scm=1007.13339.33317.0&pvid=7fd595ee-243d-42d2-af21-4933323af597&tpp=1)

~~~
VMG
thanks!

------
payne92
I am very amused by the non-Manhattan layout.

------
erdewit
I wonder what CPU frequency it runs on.

------
diimdeep
I hate that everyone marketing this as x $ but actually charge x $ +
really_expensive_shipping $

~~~
Tepix
The shipping is super cheap, have you actually checked?

------
fnj
A brand new 64-bit clean-slate board that has only USB2 and no USB3? Brain
dead. A big yawn.

~~~
simooooo
Is a device of this nature really going to be able to saturate USB2 ?

~~~
vardump
8-bit microcontrollers can saturate USB2...

This and Raspberry Pi 2+, etc. would have absolutely no problems saturating
multiple gigabit ethernet interfaces.

