Orange Pi Is The Latest Raspberry Pi Inspired ARM Board

The latest low-cost, Linux-friendly ARM single board computer is the Orange Pi that's trying to ride off the success of the Raspberry Pi.

The new Orange Pi is a series of Allwinner-based ARM SBCs with there being the Orange Pi Mini, Orange Pi, and Orange Pi Plus. The Orange Pi Mini and Orange Pi use a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 Allwinner A20 SoC with Mali-400 MP2 graphics. The Orange Pi Plus uses the Allwinner A321 quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC with PowerVR SGX544MP2 graphics. All three models ship with 1GB of RAM, SATA, and microSD storage support. The Orange Pi also features Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11g/n WiFi, USB 2.0, and expansion header.

Pricing on the Orange Pi Mini is just over $42, Orange Pi comes in around $50, and the Orange Pi Plus is closer to $80. The Allwinner SoCs tend to be open-source Linux friendly, albeit they're not the most powerful ARM SoCs out there. The pricing comes in higher than the Raspberry Pi boards while packing just a Cortex-A7 processor.

Personally I don't find the Orange Pi boards to be too interesting given their price for the hardware specs, the Mali and PowerVR hardware not having any end-user-ready/working open-source graphics driver support, etc. My personal favorite ARM SBC right now is the Jetson TK1, albeit I'm mostly concerned about Linux performance and graphics driver capabilities, so it's well worth the higher price.

Those wishing to learn more about the Orange Pi can visit OrangePi.org. Officially supported distributions for now are Android 4.4, Ubuntu, Debian, and Raspbian.