Orange Pi Launches the Orange Pi 5 Max, Boasting a 6 TOPS NPU, Four-Lane PCIe Gen. 3, and More

Packing in features including native M.2 support, three MIPI CSI inputs, and dual 8k60 video, the Orange Pi 5 Max lives up to its name.

Embedded electronics specialist Orange Pi has unveiled its latest Raspberry Pi-like single-board computer (SBC), designed to compete with the Raspberry Pi 5 — the Orange Pi 5 Max, boasting a high-performance 2.5-gigabit-Ethernet port and an on-board M.2 M-key slot supporting four lanes of PCI Express Gen. 3 connectivity.

"Orange Pi 5 Max [is an] upgraded product with more performance and higher arithmetic power," the company claims of its latest launch, "powerful enough to be widely used in high-end tablets, edge computing, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, AR/VR [Artificial Reality/Virtual Reality], smart security, smart home, etc., covering various industries of AIoT [Artificial Intelligence of Things]. Orange Pi 5 Max supports Orange Pi OS (Droid), Orange Pi OS (Arch), Orange Pi OS (OH), Ubuntu, Debian, [and] Android 12 operating system[s]."

The new Orange Pi 5 Max, brought to our attention by IT Home via Liliputing, mimics the layout of a Raspberry Pi 5 but with notable changes: the two HDMI ports use full-size connectors, rather than micro-HDMI, with 8k60 video support; there are three MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) connectors, and one Display Serial Interface (DSI) connector; there's analog audio in/out on a 3.5mm jack, plus an on-board microphone; and 2.5-gigabit-Ethernet, up from gigabit Ethernet on the Raspberry Pi 5.

Flip the board over and you'll find still more features: there's an eMMC interface for optional on-board storage, along with the usual microSD Card slot, and an M.2 M-key expansion slot — delivering, Orange Pi says, four lanes of PCI Express Gen. 2 connectivity for 2280-footprint devices, up from the single officially-rated Gen. 2 lane of the Raspberry Pi 5.

All of the above is driven by a Rockchip RK3588 system-on-chip, giving the system four performance-focused Arm Cortex-A76 cores running at up to 2.4GHz and four low-power Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 1.8GHz with an Arm Mali-G610 graphics processor.

The chip also includes a integrated neural processing unit (NPU) for on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads, delivering up to six tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute at minimum INT4 precision. To this, Orange PI has added a choice of 4GB, 8GB, or 16GB of LPDDR5 memory, along with a Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 radio module.

More information on the new board is available on the Orange Pi website, while the company has opened orders on its AliExpress store at $75 for the 4GB, $95 for the 8GB, and $125 for the 16GB variants.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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