Orange Pi Goes After High-Performance Edge AI, Partners with Huawei for Orange Pi AIpro

Single-board computer (SBC) specialist Orange Pi has announced a partnership with Huawei to make a new board targeting on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) workloads and delivering up to 20 TOPS of compute: the Orange Pi AIpro, which — for now — will be a Chinese exclusive.

"Orange Pi teamed up with Huawei to build a new artificial intelligence ecosystem," the company says of its latest device launch, in translation from the original Chinese. "Relying on a powerful ecosystem and a variety of expansion accessories, Orange Pi AIpro can help users easily achieve delivery from ideas to prototypes to mass production. It is an ideal creative platform for makers, dreamers, and amateurs."

The company's latest SBC, brought to our attention by CNX Software, is unusual for being built around a Huawei system-on-chip, a name more usually associated with smartphones. The Huawei Ascend 310B features four Arm Cortex-A76 processor cores and an Arm Mali-G57-class graphics processor with a neural network processor for on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence delivering a claimed 20 tera-operations per second (TOPS) at INT8 precision or 8 TOPS at FP16 precision.

To this, Orange Pi has added 8GB of 16GB of LPDDR4X memory, two HDMI 2.0 video outputs with 4k support and a MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) connector, a 3.5mm analog audio/video port with stereo audio and composite video, two MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) connectors, gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 4.2 wireless connectivity, two USB 3.0 Type-A and one Type-C port, a UART console on a micro-USB connector, microSD storage, eMMC support for modules up to 256GB, an M.2 M-key slot for Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) or SATA solid-state drives (SSDs), and a Raspberry Pi-style 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header.

The company claims the board can "effectively accelerate AI applications such as target recognition and image classification," and that support for the Mind Studio tool chain means it can deliver "one-click image burning tools and model adaption tools to achieve minimalist development, allowing developers to get started quickly." Target use-cases detailed by the company include education and training in artificial intelligence technologies, autonomous vehicles, robots, drones, and even cloud computing infrastructure.

Thus far, the AIpro has only been announced on Orange Pi's Chinese website — and the company has indicated that, for now at least, it will only be available in China, with listings on JD.com showing a price of 889 RMB for the 8GB and 1,149 RMB (around $125 and $161) for the 16GB versions respectively.