The Orange Pi 6 Plus
5 hours ago
- #Orange Pi 6 Plus
- #SBC Review
- #ARM Inference
- Orange Pi 6 Plus uses CIX P1 SoC with 12 cores (4 Cortex-A520 at 1.8GHz, 8 Cortex-A720 up to 2.6GHz), Mali G720 GPU, NPU, dual 5GbE, and 16GB RAM.
- Custom Debian 13/Trixie OS image built to address software issues: fixed boot chain, GPU/NPU support, and removed Ubuntu dependencies for server-first setup.
- GPU required vendor userspace packages and driver rebinding for Vulkan/OpenCL; NPU had incomplete userspace but three cores detected.
- Inference testing showed Qwen3.5 4B Q4_K_M on Vulkan (9.7 tok/s generation) as most stable; CPU inference with ik_llama.cpp sometimes outperformed GPU.
- Thermals peaked at 43°C under load with no throttling; idle power draw ~15W (higher than typical SBCs), with fan noise noticeable.
- Board suits edge AI, dual 5GbE services, and inference experiments, but software effort is high and NPU limited for LLMs.