Orange Pi 4/B Review – A Raspberry Rival Starting at $50

Orange Pi 4 Review

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 4B Product video

Orange Pi 4B Specs & Price

Orange Pi 4 Specs & Price

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

Package

Unboxing (Package Content)

• 1x Orange Pi 4/B
• 1x User manual
• 1x WiFi Antenna (wire type)

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 4B

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.

Metal Case [Optional]

The metal aluminium case is an optional accessory worth considering buying for a few extra dollars. I recommend it because Rockchip RK3299 CPU tend to heat and it’s a must-have item if you want to keep your board cooler. In terms of design, I less liked the idea of using such large length thermal conductive pads to pass the extra heat trough the Case shell, but still, it’s better than the alternatives using a simple plastic case, and it does cool the CPU very well.

The core temperature of the Orange Pi 4/B can start from 52C and above depending how much you really stress/load the CPU. We are talking about very reasonable temperatures range compared to the Raspberry Pi 4 SBC that also tends to heats up. If you touch the case, especially when the hardware is under high stress, you can feel the heat level by just touching the case.

Orange Pi 4B Case

Assembling the Orange Pi 4B inside the 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.

Ubuntu Xenial Desktop

Armbian Focal Desktop

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.

CPU Temperature reading under Armbian

In idle mode, the CPU core temperature was pretty high, starting from approximately ~55-60C. At a regular operation without running intensive CPU tasks, you can expect CPU temperature to rise to 74-80C, which is exceptionally high.

Armbian Focal Desktop | Htop

Monitoring CPU cores frequency/temperatures, and memory in real-time using Htop process viewer.

Memory consumption under Armbian

Results: 483MB of of 3959 MB RAM are utilized!

CPU Benchmark | Raspberry Pi 4 vs Orange Pi 4B

• Running the test with the following options:
  Number of threads: 4
• Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 20000

sysbench –num-threads=4 –test=cpu –cpu-max-prime=20000 –validate run

Orange Pi 4B (Rockchip RK3399)

CPU: 6-core ARM® 64-bit processor – (2x Cortex-A72 at up to 2.0GHz, 4x Cortex-A53).

sysbench 1.0.18

CPU speed:
events per second: 1883.78

General statistics:
total time: 10.0022s
total number of events: 18856

Latency (ms):
min: 1.26
avg: 2.12
max: 7.12
95th percentile: 6.21
sum: 39997.04

Threads fairness:
events (avg/stddev): 4714.0000/3093.50
execution time (avg/stddev): 9.9993/0.00

Raspberry Pi 4 (Broadcom BCM2711)

CPU: 4-core ARM® 64-bit processor – (4x Cortex-A72 at up to 1.5GHz)

sysbench 0.4.12

Test execution summary:
total time: 62.8740s
total number of events: 10000
total time taken by event execution: 251.4166
per-request statistics:
min: 24.94ms
avg: 25.14ms
max: 115.22ms
approx. 95 percentile: 25.08ms

Threads fairness:
events (avg/stddev): 2500.0000/4.58
execution time (avg/stddev): 62.8541/0.01

Results comparison Table ( Latency in ms)

A note: lower values are better!

Results:

Based on the above latency results, the clear winner in CPU performance is the Orange Pi 4 SBC over the Raspberry Pi 4.

Stress Test

For our test, we used the stress-ng tool to run up to 8 CPU stressors, 4 I/O stressors, and one virtual memory stressor using 1GB of virtual memory for one minute by executing the following commands below.

1. stress-ng –cpu 2 –io 4 –vm 1 –vm-bytes 1G –timeout 60s –metrics-brief
2. stress-ng –cpu 4 –io 4 –vm 1 –vm-bytes 1G –timeout 60s –metrics-brief
3. stress-ng –cpu 6 –io 4 –vm 1 –vm-bytes 1G –timeout 60s –metrics-brief
4. stress-ng –cpu 8 –io 4 –vm 1 –vm-bytes 1G –timeout 60s –metrics-brief

Test results

• Under heavy stress load, the CPU critical core temperature reached up to 80-82C, and then the board automatically shut down to avoid hardware damage.
• The average wattage usage of the Orange Pi 4B board in our stress test was between 18-21.4W.

Solving CPU Overheating & How to Keep it Cool

The best and straightforward approach to reduce the temperature by ~5C is placing a small fan on top of the Orange Pi 4/B case logo. You can use a single or a dual-fan array unit composed of a thick Heatsink with a double sides adhesive thermal sticker.

• For more detailed information check Aokin AliExpress store.
• External dimensions: 51mm x 25mm x 13mm

Neural Processing

The Orange Pi 4B comes with the world’s first deep learning CNN accelerator chip Lightspeeur® 2801S for deep-learning applications by Gyrfalcon Technologies. The Lightspeeur® 2801S neural processing unit (NPU) chip is designed to run audio and video processing to power AI devices for desktop, and data center deployment.

Orange Pi 4B Lightspeeur® 2801 Chip (Marked in yellow)

Bottom Line

The Orange Pi 4B is an excellent and very snappy board in terms of performance. The only issue I had was the CPU overheating when the board was mounted inside the Orange Pi 4/B metal case that you can solve by installing a small cooling fan on top of it that helps disperse extra heat away from the case shell. Having said that, If you like the product, your welcome to check more detail on Xunlong’s official AliExpress store (Link posted below).