Shenzhen Xunlong's Orange Pi 800 Aims to Offer a Speedy Alternative to the Raspberry Pi 400
Resolutely refusing to hide its inspiration, the Orange Pi 800 includes a six-core Rockchip RK3399 SoC and 4GB of RAM.
Shenzhen Xunlong, the company behind the Orange Pi family of single-board computers, has announced its latest design — and it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to see where the company found the inspiration for its Orange Pi 800.
The Orange Pi 800 is, as even a cursory glance reveals, Shenzhen Xunlong's answer to the popular Raspberry Pi 400. Like its inspiration, the machine takes the heart of an existing single-board computer design — the Orange Pi 4 in this case — and modifies it for inclusion inside a keyboard, offering something akin to the classic personal computers of the 1980s and early 1990s.
Inside the Orange Pi 800 is a Rockchip RK3399 system-on-chip (SoC), which offers two high-performance Arm Cortex-A72 cores running at up to 1.8GHz and four high-efficiency Cortex-A53 cores running at up to 1.4GHz. There's an Arm Mali-T860 MP4 graphics processor, 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, and 64GB of eMMC storage — expandable through a microSD slot at the rear of the case. Finally, there's a pair of radios on-board for dual-band 802.11/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0 with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) support.
Looking to the rear of the case, which owes much to Raspberry Pi's industrial design on the Raspberry Pi 400, there are HDMI and VGA connectors for video, two USB 3.0 ports and a single USB 2.0 port, a gigabit Ethernet connector, a USB Type-C power input, an analog audio connector for headsets and microphones, and a 26-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header for hardware expansion. Interestingly, there's also a speaker grille — one-upping the Raspberry Pi 400 on the feature front.
The Orange Pi 800 is Shenzhen Xunlong's biggest launch since the Orange Pi 4 LTS, unveiled earlier this year as an alternative to its existing Orange Pi 4. Featuring the same Rockchip RK3399 SoC as the Orange Pi 800, the Orange Pi 4 LTS played around with the design of the original Orange Pi 4 in order to work around component shortages — including a shift away from the standard 40-pin GPIO header to a 26-pin variant based on the very first Raspberry Pi models.
The company has announced plans to release the machine running a Chromium OS build, with support for its Arch-based Orange Pi OS Linux distribution for power users — with the promise of supporting Windows applications, likely through a combination of Wine and Box86 to translate traditional x86 Windows applications to both Linux and Arm. Details of this latter functionality, however, have not been disclosed.
Shenzhen Xunlong has yet to confirm pricing and availability for the Orange Pi 800, but has a list of additional specifications on the official product page.