The Orange Pi 5 Ultra Packs Four Lanes of PCIe Gen. 3, Eight Cores, a Six-TOPS NPU, and More

Single-board computer maker Orange Pi has announced a new entry in its Raspberry Pi-inspired Orange Pi 5 family, the Orange Pi 5 Ultra — packing an eight-core processor, six tera-operations per second (TOPS) neural coprocessor, and up to 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM.

"Orange Pi 5 Ultra is compact, measuring only 89×57mm [around 3.5×2.24"], and powerful enough to be widely used in high-end tablets, edge computing, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, AR/VR [Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality], smart security, smart home, etc., covering various industries of AIoT [Artificial Intelligence of Things]," the company claims of its latest launch. "Orange Pi 5 Ultra supports Orange Pi OS, the official operating system developed by Orange Pi, as well as Ubuntu, Android 13, Debian, and other operating systems."

Designed as a higher-end successor to the Orange PI 5 Max, the Orange Pi 5 Ultra, brought to our attention by Linux Gizmos, is powered by the Rockchip RK3588 system-on-chip, giving it four high-performance Arm Cortex-A76 cores running at up to 2.4GHz and four lower-power Cortex-A55 cores running at up to 1.8GHz plus Arm's NEON acceleration engine. There's also an on-chip Arm Mali-G610 graphics processor, a neural coprocessor for on-device machine learning and edge artificial intelligence (ML and edge AI) delivering six tera-operations per second at its minimum INT4 precision.

To this, Orange Pi has added a Raspberry Pi-style board, which adds the buyer's choice of 4GB, 8GB, or 16GB of LPDDR5 memory, optional 32GB-256GB eMMC storage, and brings out two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 Type-A ports, one HDMI 2.1 8k60 output and one HDMI 2.0 4k60 input, a four-lane MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI), two four-lane Camera Serial Interfaces (CSIs) and a MIPI D-PHY receive port, analog audio, and a 2.5-gigabit-Ethernet port that joins an on-board Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) module for connectivity.

Unsurprisingly the board also includes a 40-pin 0.1" general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, styled after the one at the top of Raspberry Pi boards. Like the Raspberry Pi 5, the Orange Pi 5 Ultra takes a 5V 5A power supply over a USB Type-C input — and, also like the Raspberry Pi 5, the board includes PCI Express connectivity, though it's brought out to a standard M.2 M-key slot on the underside and supports four lanes of faster PCI Express Gen. 3 connectivity compared to its rival's single lane of PCI Express Gen. 2.

The Orange Pi 5 Ultra is available to order from the company's official AliExpress store, priced at $125 before shipping with 16GB of RAM and with no eMMC; pricing for the 4GB and 8GB variants had not been announced at the time of writing. Additional information is available on the Orange Pi website.