First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20 | Hacker News Reader

First 64-bit Orange Pi slips in under $20

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51 pointsdeviceguru28 comments

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.

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.

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.

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

A very valid point, especially considering how quickly an SD card can be corrupted by write activity

NVMe is probably coming at some point.

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.

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. .

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?

https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-EdgeRouter-Advanced-Gigabit-...

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-ERLITE-3-Desktop-...

Something like this? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/874883570/marvell-espre...

but then we need to see how fast they are on the network side

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

I wondered that too. But turning them might make shorter data lines, which incur less capacitance and less crosstalk. They also might have avoided a bunch of 90-degree elbows.

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.

Using 90 or 45 angles is a restriction on your design, not a feature. Also, it would be naive to assume that they dropped those constraints just for the lulz.

It looks wrong, particularly since for DDR3 signaling there are typically very strict design recommendations for the placement of the memory chips in relation to the CPU.

It also seems to work, so maybe the recommendations are just that.

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.

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

Is this related to the well known Raspberry Pi?

I wouldn't think so. It looks like they're just using a similar name to signal that it's a similar thing.

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

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

If the GPIO pins were compatible, then you could probably use libraries and HW accessories from the RPi ecosystem. Unfortunately, the article doesn't specify whether that's the case.

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

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.

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

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

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