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Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

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Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#101

Post by dlcarrier »

antonkochubey wrote: post #47

Ubuntu will not support RISC-V CPUs without RVA23 support going further, so this is stuck on 24.04 forever. There is no official Debian image either, and the Ubuntu version uses fixed kernel 6.6.47 with no further updates (it is not even installed from a repo). I own one since a couple months ago but I already regret the purchase.

Ubuntu is the worst of the Debian based Linux distributions. Give MX Linux a try. It's rarely evangelized, unlike other Linux distributions, but it has a surprisingly high user base, and for good reason. Everything it has added to Debian enhances it, and it doesn't try to promote any services, like Ubuntu does with Canonical's services.

Regardless of the Linux distribution, it's still way to early to get good support for RISC-V. Current products are good enough for general development, but RVA23 was ratified less than a year ago, and I don't know of any designs started after the ratification that have hit the market yet. Once that's the case, it should be easier to get universal support, but until then, every RISC-V SBC is a one-off development board.

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#102

Post by dlcarrier »

leoedin wrote: post #67

The big ecosystem of SBCs confuses me a bit. Who is buying these? The work required to build an actual secure, maintainable product on top of an SBC is so big that you'd surely never use one of these. The hard work is all in software. You need a supplier with product lifetime guarantees and a known SoC manufacturer. If you're a hobbyist, unless you really don't value your time you'd be much better served buying an x8…

I mostly use them for things specifically designed to not need software maintenance. I use them in test fixtures and other embedded systems. Anything that is connected to a network isn't connected to the internet, and regardless of a network connection, I always set the filesystem as immutable and create backups of the SD card, so if anything goes modified, restarting usually fixes it, but if not re-imaging the SD card for sure will.

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#103

Post by dlcarrier »

chithanh wrote: post #19
protocolture wrote: post #9

I keep seeing suggestions that theres no software support for Orange Pi. Whats the go there? Is there no distro like Raspbian supporting it?

Xunlong (Orange Pi) operates similarly to Pine64, throw hardware at the community and then let the community figure out the software part. They provide official OS images at release but don't care much afterwards.

Pine64's claim to fame is that they have really good documentation, surpassing even the Raspberry Pi. That's what creates a good community around their products.

Most customers couldn't port software to an SBC, but for the ones who can, having all of the documentation makes it trivially easy, and having any that share their work makes it available to the whole community.

Check out the Oz64 documentation, (https://pine64.org/documentation/Oz64/_full/) which includes schematics and links to the datasheets for all of the major components. Raspberry Pi products, on the other hand, need some pretty intense reverse engineering to develop on: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/reverse-engineering-a....

For my use case, and most Pine64 customers, I'd rather have the hardware documentation than off-the-shelf official support for a software stack. Raspberry Pi has an entirely different user base.

Orange Pi fills a similar niche, and really anyone releasing RISC-V SBCs at this point does too, as it's too early into the development of the architecture for microprocessor-level products.

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#104

Post by dlcarrier »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #98
slaw wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the website you bought it from?

amazon.nl EDIT: adding the seller on Amazon.nl was BestMii, and they were linked as the sellers from Orange Pi website.

I was wondering what was going on, because Orange Pi only sells to distributors, not direct to customers.

Amazon only has a single listing for any given product, and all distributors, whether authorized or not, are under the same listing. When there's more than one distributor, you can choose which one to order from, but the buy now button follows a default.

If it isn't too late, I would highly recommend disputing through Amazon, as disputes are the only way Amazon addresses problem distributors. Many know how to game the system, so if you communicate directly with them, they will try to delay you until after the dispute period has ended.

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#105

Post by DoctorOetker »

dlcarrier wrote: post #104
DoctorOetker wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

amazon.nl EDIT: adding the seller on Amazon.nl was BestMii, and they were linked as the sellers from Orange Pi website.

I was wondering what was going on, because Orange Pi only sells to distributors, not direct to customers. Amazon only has a single listing for any given product, and all distributors, whether authorized or not, are under the same listing. When there's more than one distributor, you can choose which one to order from, but the buy now button follows a default. If it isn't too late, I would highly recommend disputing th…

It was the only amazon distributor as far as I know.

they were directly linked from the Orange Pi 5 website.

Its their responsibility they direct their customers to dubious distribution systems (IF THAT IS THE CASE).

We should never reward orders or preorders in any fast devaluating area (like electronics) to be reneged after inflation: this would allow manufacturers to post-select a financial path: if less inflation than expected fulfill order, if more inflation than expected renege the deal.

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#106

Post by dlcarrier »

cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #58
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #8

Absolutely smoked by rpi5, often by rpi4. To make matters worse, a radically unsupported core with no mainline support. https://www.phoronix.com/review/orange-pi-rv2-benchmarks/2

I can accept the performance issues for now- it's an emerging platform, and hasn't had the huge amounts of resources poured into it like ARM. There's a chicken-and-egg problem here, since those resources will be limited since people aren't buying RISC-V equipment, which limits the incentive to commit resources, etc. But what I cannot accept is the truly awful documentation and software support from the vendors. This…

Poor vendor software support is also expected, because it's too early into development of the RISC-V architecture for software to have universal support on different hardware variations.

What that leaves is a need for good documentation, but Orange Pi does have that: http://www.orangepi.org/orangepiwiki/index.php/Orange_Pi_RV2

If you're not working on RISC-V-specific development, than it isn't a product for you, but with step-by-step guides for building uboot and the linux kernel, as well as running various LLMs on the TPU, it is very well supported for the current RISC-V audience.

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#107

Post by dlcarrier »

maxlin wrote: post #96

I caught Orange Pi doing misleading advertising earlier, trying to make people hear that the CPU has an NPU. Does this actually have any AI hardware or not?

The Ky X1 has AI acceleration on 4 of its 8 cores, creating 2 TOPS performance. There's a guide for running LLMs here: http://www.orangepi.org/orangepiwiki/index.php/Orange_Pi_RV2...

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#108

Post by dlcarrier »

muxamilian wrote: post #35
asadm wrote: post #14

2 TOPS is not a lot for AI projects.

They get this number by simply adding up all CPUs' processing speed. There is no NPU or similar: https://medium.com/@zlodeibaal/orange-pi-rv2-ai-board-scam-7...

Four of the eight cores have matrix accelerators. If you are using the full 2 TOPS of accelerated performance, you have four more otherwise symmetric cores free to run regular workloads, otherwise you have eight. I'd rather have this setup than 4 regular cores and a separate asymmetric accelerator that provides 2 TOPS to matrix/tensor calculations but otherwise sits idle.

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#109

Post by dlcarrier »

_zoltan_ wrote: post #11
warrenm wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPUs are [effectively] irrelevant for many use cases (IoT, embedded, most servers, etc)

the title says "... AI projects". now, maybe our definitions are different, but you probably want some hardware acceleration.

Low-power processors rarely have the AI accelerated instructions in the GPU, instead opting either for dedicated matrix/tensor cores, or as is used in the case, adding the acceleration instructions directly to the CPU core.

This results in a higher performance per Watt, but doesn't scale well to higher-power applications.

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#110

Post by dlcarrier »

Findecanor wrote: post #21
webdevver wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they all suck. someone needs to make an open source gpu already, its been way too long.

It is at least theoretically possible to build a headless "GPU" from RISC-V processors that have the vector extension (RVV). RVV had been designed to be able to run programs compiled for the SIMT execution model that most GPUs use. This Orange Pi RV2 has a small vector unit in each core, and could be used for at least prototyping the software until more powerful chips are available. BTW. There have also been a couple…

The vector instructions are only in four of the eight cores. There's also extra cache in those cores, but they are otherwise symmetrical to the other four.
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