Orange Pi 4

First enhancement of the new Orange Pi 4 SBC board series expected to be available in about two weeks. Following the gained popularity of the Rockchip SoC solution amongst known Chinese brands such as the FriendlyElec Nano Pi M4v2 boards that are also based on the Rockchip RK3399 solution.

The new Orange Pi 4 comes with few hardware improvements worth checking. For example, a DC power input port was added for more stable power requirements with an additional USB Type-C port that can be also used to power the board. Another advantage is the 16GB eMMC chip that is soldered on the PCB so you will not have to buy a separate eMMC module. Additional features and highlights worth mentioning are the On-board Microphone unit, Power Management Unit (PMU) chip, 4GB RAM memory, and a 24 pins PCIe Interface. As for the USB ports, In the Orange Pi 4B edition, the company decided to stick with a pair of USB V2.0 without any additional USB 3.0 host port support. According to the company announcement, the more advanced Orange Pi 4B is more suitable for artificial intelligence (Deep learning) applications, equipped with a unique Gyrfalcon Lightspeeur 2801S AI accelerator chip/NPU (Neural Processor unit) developed by Gyrfalcon Technology Inc. In the software arena, the Orange Pi 4/B boards are expected to support Android 8. x and Armbian Linux including future distributions. Orange Pi 4/B Specification SoC – Rockchip K3399 Hexa-core big.LITTLE processor with two Arm Cortex A72 cores, four Cortex A53 cores, and an ARM Mali-T860 MP4 GPU with support for OpenGL 1.1 to 3.1 support, OpenVG1.1, OpenCL and DX 11 System Memory – 4 GB LPDDR4 Storage – 16 GB eMMC flash, micro SD card NPU (Orange Pi 4B only) – Gyrfalcon Lightspeeur SPR2801S NPU delivering up to 2.8TOPS @ 300mW, 5.6 TOPS @ 100 MHz (peak performance) Video Output/Display Interface HDMI 2.0 up to 4K @ 60 Hz LCD connector – DisplayPort (DP) version 1.2 Video Decode – 4K VP9 and 10-bit H.265 video codec support up to 60 fps Audio – 3.5 mm audio jack for headphones; HDMI digital audio output; built-in microphone; ALC5651 codec Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet port (via RTL8211E transceiver), dual-band 802.11ac 2×2 MIMO WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 LE (AP6256 module) USB Orange Pi 4 – 1x USB 3.0 port, 2x USB 2.0 host ports, 1x USB 3.0 type C port Orange Pi 4B – 2x USB 2.0 host ports, 1x USB 3.0 type C port Camera – 2x camera headers Debugging – 3-pin serial header Expansion 40-pin GPIO 2.54mm pitch female header with 2x I2C, 1x SPI, 8x UART, GPIO, etc… 24-pin connector for PCIe signals Power Supply 12V/2A via DC jack (5.5/2.1mm) 5V3A DC via type C port RK808 PMU Dimensions – 91 x 56 mm

The Hardware The Orange Pi 4B hardware is based on the popular Rockchip’s RK3399 system-on-chip processor, equipped with a six-core design, that is divided into two clusters, both running “up to” 2GHz; a dual-core Arm Cortex-A72 cluster handles high-demand tasks; a quad-core Arm Cortex-A54 cluster is on-hand for less-demanding work as a means of saving power. Orange Pi 4 vs Orange Pi 4B If you are asking yourself what’s the difference between the 4 and 4B editions, the answer lays on the PCB design. The Orange Pi 4B model comes with a pair of USB 2.0 hosts and also includes an integrated high-performance NPU co-processor that is more suitable for the development of products involving deep learning capabilities. While the Orange Pi 4B only has two USB 2.0 Hosts, the Orange Pi 4 comes with a total of three USB hosts: Two USB 2.0 Hosts, plus an additional USB 3.0 host. As for the rest of the specs including all interfaces, they remain identical. Xunlong company didn’t add a power button but included a reset push button located on the back of both boards what makes it impossible to access it if you are using the Orange Pi 4/B metal case. The Software In the software arena, the Orange Pi 4/B offers about four types of images available on the official orange pi website. You have Debian, Ubuntu, and Armbian Linux distribution specially designed for embedded computing that works very stable. Android 8.x is also supported and worked very smoothly for me. from 4GB RAM the OS used only %20 and from a total of 16GB of internal storage (flash memory) only $5.5GB were used. My best user experience for me was running Armbian OS based on Debian. The diversity of software packages that came preinstalled in the distro was excellent, and basicaly everything worked smoothly and fast.