Orange Pi Launches the Edge AI-Focused Orange Pi 4A Single-Board Computer with Allwinner T527

Embedded compute specialist Orange Pi has launched its latest single-board computer, the Orange Pi 4A — built around an Allwinner T527 eight-core processor with two tera-operations per second (TOPS) neural coprocessor for on-device edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) workloads.

"Orange Pi 4A is based on [the] Allwinner T527 octa-core [Arm] Cortex-A55 + HiFi4 DSP [Digital Signal Processor] + RISC-V multi-core heterogeneous industrial-grade processor, supporting [a] 2 TOPS NPU to meat the edge of the intelligent AI acceleration applications," the company says of its latest board design. "Orange Pi 4A can be widely used in intelligent industrial control, intelligent commercial display, retail payment, intelligent education, commercial robotics, vehicle terminals, visual co-driving, edge computing, intelligent power distribution terminals, etc."

The compact single-board computer, brought to our attention by CNX Software, follows the rough footprint of a Raspberry Pi, as you'd expect from Orange Pi, with four USB Type-A ports next to a gigabit Ethernet port. The longer side of the board is home to an HDMI 2.0 port good for 4k60 displays, while there's also embedded DisplayPort 1.3 (eDP 1.3) and a four-lane MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI). There's a 3.5mm jack for analog audio, one two-lane and one-four lane MIPI Camera Serial Interfaces (CSIs), room for an optional eMMC module, microSD Card, and an M.2 M-Key PCI Express Gen. 2 slot for Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) storage or accelerator boards.

The Allwinner T527 at the board's heart is an eight-core dual-performance design, but somewhat unusual in using Arm's Cortex-A55 for both its high-performance and high-efficiency cores — the former clocked at up to 1.8GHz and the latter up to 1.42GHz.

The system-on-chip also includes a T-Head XuanTie E906 RISC-V core running at up to 200MHz, a two TOPS neural coprocessor, a 600MHz HiFi4 DSP, an Arm Mali-G57 MC1 graphics processor, and a video subsystem offering H.264/H.265 decoding at up to 4k60 and H.264 encoding at up to 4k25. Finally, there's on-board Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 Low Energy (BLE), a 40-pin Raspberry Pi-style general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, and a dedicated four-pin connector for two analog to digital converter (ADC) channels designed for 1.8V logic.

More information, including as-yet unpopulated download links for schematics and software images, is available on the Orange Pi website; the board is available to order on AliExpress at $35 for with 2GB of LPDDR4 memory or $40 with 4GB, both plus shipping.