Orange Pi Launches Quad-Core Rockchip-Powered Alternative to the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4
The imaginatively-named Orange Pi Compute Module 4 includes four Arm Cortex-A55 cores, a Mali-G52 GPU, and a 0.8 TOPS neural coprocessor.
Embedded electronics specialist Orange Pi has launched a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4-compatible system-on-module (SOM) built around the Rockchip RK3566 system-on-chip — and it's called, unsurprisingly, the Orange Pi Compute Module 4.
"Orange Pi Compute Module 4 is compact and powerful enough for deep embedded applications," the company claims of its latest launch, which is designed to be a pin-compatible drop-in replacement for Raspberry Pi's Compute Module 4 family — though the company has also announced an in-house carrier board, for those without existing investment in the CM4 ecosystem.
The heart of the module, brought to our attention by CNX Software, is a Rockchip RK3566 system-on-chip, with a 64-bit quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor running at up to 1.8GHz, a Mali-G52 2EE graphics processor with OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 2.0, and Vulkan 1.1 support, an an "AI Gas Pedal" RKNN neural network coprocessor offering a claimed 0.8 tera-operations per second (TOPS) at INT8 for machine learning workloads. A vision processor offers hardware-accelerated H.264/H.265/VP9 decoding at up to 4k60, with encoders for 1080p100 H.265 or 1080p60 H.264.
There's a choice of 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB of LPDDR4 RAM, depending on model chosen, along with 8GB, 32GB, 64GB, or 128GB of on-board eMMC storage. All models come with a radio module offering Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, and an on-board gigabit Ethernet PHY. Other interfaces exposed on the two high-density connectors on the underside of the board include SATA, PCI Express, USB 3.0 and USB 2.0, a four-lane MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI), an HDMI 2.0 interface with 4k60 support, and one each of four-lane and two-lane MIPI Display Serial Interfaces (DSIs).
For those who don't already have a carrier board to hand, the Orange Pi CM4 has an optional carrier designed to mimic the full-size Raspberry Pi form factor, breaking out a two CSI and a single DSI port, three USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet, micro-HDMI, analog audio, an M.2 M-key slot, microSD slot, and a 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header. On the software side, the module is said to support Android 11, Orange Pi's in-house Arch- and OpenHarmony-based operating systems, Huawei's OpenHarmony 4.0 Beta 1, and a range of Linux distributions including Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Debian 11, and Debian 12.
Several variants of the Orange Pi CM4 boards are listed for sale on Orange Pi's AliExpress store, priced at $22.90 for the 1GB/8GB variant rising to $46.90 for the 8GB/64GB version; the carrier board is priced at $9.90. All prices include a claimed 30 per cent launch discount.
More information is available on the Orange Pi website.