Single-board computer specialist Orange Pi has announced its latest RISC-V based design, the Orange Pi R2S — packing two 2.5-gigabit-Ethernet ports and two gigabit Ethernet ports for use as a managed switch, border gateway, or other network appliance, complete with a two tera-operations per second (TOPS) processor for on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.
“With dual gigabit network interfaces and two 2.5G Ethernet ports for faster data transfer speeds, whether it’s office file transfers or HD video playback, it’s smooth and unobstructed,” the company says of its latest design. “Compact body size, only 79.2×46mm [around 3.12×1.81″], easy to integrate into various environments, does not occupy space, easy to place.”
If you’re looking to put a little artificial intelligence into your network, Orange Pi’s new R2S can help. (📷: Orange Pi)
The board is built around the Ky X1 system-on-chip, the same as the company’s earlier Orange Pi RV2 board, which includes eight RISC-V cores claimed to be around a third again as fast as an Arm Cortex-A55 core plus a “CPU-fused” neural processing subsystem that can deliver two tera-operations per second (TOPS) of INT8-precision compute for on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) workloads — without, the company claims, the need for a dedicated coprocessor.
The board, brought to our attention by CNX Software, is considerably more pared-down than its predecessor, however: there’s the choice of 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB of LPDDR4X memory, 8GB of on-board eMMC storage, and the impressive inclusion of two 2.5-gig-Ethernet ports plus two gigabit ports, but those aside the only other connectivity is found in a single USB 3.0 port and a single USB 2.0 port. There’s a microSD Card slot for storage expansion, a three-pin serial port for debugging, and that’s all.
The new board uses the same Ky X1 chip as the earlier Orange Pi RV2, but reduces the connectivity options considerably. (📷: Orange Pi)
On the software front, the company promises support for the OpenWRT network appliance operating system plus Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux — though as the board lacks any kind of display output, it will have to be run headless in either case. Power comes through a USB Type-C port, rated at 5V 3A — though Orange Pi has not shared actual power draw measurements under load or at idle.
More information on the new board is available on the Orange Pi website, while the company has listed the board for sale at $30 for 2GB of RAM, $39.90 for 4GB of RAM, and the unavailable-at-the-time-of-writing 8GB model at $49.90.