Orange Pi Doubles the RAM on Its Orange Pi 5 Single-Board Computers, Now Offers Up to 32GB

Embedded electronics specialist Orange Pi has responded to the unveiling of the Raspberry Pi 5, due to launch later this month, with a little upgrade for its own fifth-generation single-board computer family — which is now available to buy with an impressive 32GB of RAM on board.

Based on the Rockchip RK3588 system-on-chip, the Orange Pi 5 range — the Orange Pi 5, Orange Pi 5B, and Orange Pi 5 Plus — had previously been available with up to 16GB of LPDDR4x RAM, twice the maximum available on its at-the-time competition the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. The announcement of the Raspberry Pi 5 may not have brought an increase in maximum RAM — yet — but Orange Pi has a response ready anyway: a boost to 32GB of RAM, as brought to our attention by CNX Software.

The hardware of the boards remains otherwise unchanged, with features varying by model but all including the Rockchip RK3588 system-on-chip with four Arm Cortex-A76 performance cores running at up to 2.4GHz and four lower-power Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 1.8GHz, an Arm Mali-G610 MP4 GPU, and a machine learning coprocessor offering a claimed 6 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of additional compute.

There's no change to software support, nor is the increased RAM capacity joined by an increase to the available eMMC storage modules — which remain available in 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities as higher-speed alternatives to a microSD card — but the move is likely to be welcomed by those running on-device machine learning and edge artificial intelligence (edge-AI) workloads who had previously found themselves constrained by available memory.

All three models are available to order now with shipping expected to start at the end of the month; the Orange Pi 5 is priced at $159 with the Orange Pi 5B and Orange Pi 5 Plus priced at $179 each, all excluding shipping and each representing a claimed 30 percent discount over the planned retail price.