Orange Pi’s CM5 Provides a Excessive-Efficiency Different to the Raspberry Pi CM4

Embedded {hardware} specialist Orange Pi has launched a high-performance various to the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) system-on-module vary, dubbed — considerably unsurprisingly — the Orange Pi CM5, boasting a Rockchip RK3588S system-on-chip and neural coprocessor for on-device machine studying and synthetic intelligence (ML and AI) workloads.

“Orange Pi CM5 [is a] compact and highly effective industrial PC,” the corporate claims of its newest {hardware} launch, designed as a substitute for the favored Raspberry Pi CM4 and dropped at our consideration by CNX Software program. “Orange Pi CM5 is powered by the Rockchip RK3588S 8-core 64-bit processor with 4 Cortex-A76 (2.4GHz) and 4 Cortex-A55 (1.8GHz) [cores].”

The eight foremost processing cores, 4 tuned for efficiency and 4 for power effectivity, aren’t the one processors within the RK3588S, although: the chip additionally presents an Arm Mali-G610 GPU and a neural processing unit (NPU) delivering a claimed six tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute at its minimal INT4 precision — taking the pressure of on-device ML and AI workloads off the CPU. There is a selection of 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, or 16GB of LPDDR4/4X reminiscence, 32-256GB of eMMC storage, and the acquainted Raspberry Pi CM4 board-to-board connectors on the underside — although the 2 commonplace connectors are joined by a non-standard third.

Which means that whereas the Orange Pi CM5 — which beats Raspberry Pi’s personal Compute Module 5, to be based mostly across the similar know-how as the corporate’s Raspberry Pi 5, to market — needs to be a drop-in alternative for a Raspberry Pi CM4 in lots of designs, accessing a few of its extra superior options would require a customized provider with the third connector included.

In an acceptable board, the corporate says, this may ship three USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0 port, DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.1 or embedded DisplayPort (eDP) 1.3 ports, four- and two-lane MIPI Show Serial Interface (DSI) and a four-lane Digital camera Serial Interface (CSI), SATA III and PCI Categorical 2.0 growth, SDIO 3.0, and a spread of general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) pins together with entry to I2C, I2S, UART, SPI, and CAN buses.

Orange Pi, naturally, has a provider board of its personal design, the Orange Pi CM5 Base. This compact board brings out a subset of the board’s options whereas including a number of of its personal, together with a gigabit Ethernet port and two 2.5-gig-Ethernet ports, an HDMI show output, microSD storage, one every of USB 3.0 and USB 2.0, and GPIO on a 12-pin versatile printed circuit (FPC) connector with a second four-pin header offering entry to 2 12-bit analog to digital converter (ADC) inputs.

The Orange Pi CM5 Base Board is out there on the corporate’s AliExpress retailer at $20, with the CM5 boards themselves starting at $70 for one with 4GB RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage rising to $119 with 16GB of RAM and 32GB eMMC storage — with all costs representing a claimed 30 % introductory low cost over the deliberate commonplace retail worth.