GoKawiilThis was a long one–I spent a fair bit of time with the Orange Pi 6 Plus over the past few months, and what I expected to be a quick look at another fast ARM board turned into one of those test runs where the hardware looks promising on paper, the software is wonky in exactly the wrong places, and you end up diving far more into boot chains, vendor GPU blobs and inference runtimes than you ever intended.
The Orange Pi 6+ on a corner of my desk
Unlike most of the ARM boards I’ve reviewed until now, this one is not an RK3588 board: The Orange Pi 6 Plus uses the CIX P1 (CD8180/CD8160), with 12 CPU cores, a Mali G720 GPU, a dedicated NPU and a wild set of specs for the form factor. Boards like this promise everything at once–homelab, edge AI, dual 5GbE, low power–but they only matter if the software gets out of the way.
Disclaimer: Orange Pi supplied me with a 6 Plus free of charge, and, as usual, this article follows my review policy.
And, for a change, I decided to make sure the software did exactly that, and made it my concern from the start–i.e., I built my own OS images for it (a fork of orangepi-build) and went in a bit deeper than usual, spending around two months taking notes, benchmark logs and even Graphite telemetry as I went along.
Hardware
The Orange Pi 6 Plus board (image: Orange Pi)
One of the reasons I wanted to test this board is that the SoC is the CIX P1, which Orange Pi bills as a 12-core part with a combined 45 TOPS across CPU, GPU and NPU. The machine I tested came with:
CIX P1 (CD8180/CD8160), 4×Cortex-A520 plus 8×Cortex-A720 cores
16GiB of RAM (roughly 14GiB visible to Linux)
... continue reading