Earlier this month Canonical announced Ubuntu Linux support for the Orange Pi RV2 as a low-cost RISC-V developer board. The Orange Pi RV2 with eight RISC-V cores and 8GB of RAM costs just around $64 USD. The price point and specs were interesting that I ordered one and have been running performance benchmarks on it since for seeing how capable this is as finally an interesting, low-cost and readily available RISC-V board.
I’ll pre-face this by saying the Orange Pi RV2 still isn’t to even the performance of prior-generation Raspberry Pi single board computers, but it’s much better than what we’ve seen out of other RISC-V boards to date. For $64 USD on Amazon.com (affiliate link) you can get this board with its Ky X1 RISC-V SoC bearing eight cores at 1.6GHz, 8GB of LPDDR4X memory, HDMI out, dual Gigabit Ethernet, M.2 2230 slot, and other features on this SBC. Or if running an embedded workload or not needing 8GB of RAM, there is a version of this RISC-V SBC with 2GB of RAM for just $42 USD on the same product page or $53 USD for a 4GB version… The pricing is much better than what we’ve seen out of RISC-V boards in the past. And with them being available via Amazon and even Amazon Prime for some models, you can get it in a matter of days — this isn’t any pre-ordering / crowdfunding, ordering out of China, etc. So for a readily available RISC-V single board computer with eight RISC-V cores and 8GB of RAM for less than $100 it’s an interesting proposition.
Mind you the first interesting RISC-V developer board that was readily available was the SiFive HiFive Unmatched that was four cores and costing more than $600 USD. Granted, mini-ITX form factor and the like, but in any event for those just after some performant board (for RISC-V standards) and not too expensive, there are finally interesting options becoming available.
There is the StarFive VisionFive 2 that I covered back in 2023. That single board computer is still readily available on the likes of Amazon (affiliate link) but for $99 USD and that JH7110 SoC just being a four-core RISC-V SoC up to 1.5GHz and having 8GB of LPDDR4 memory. The Orange Pi RV2 specs are better than this two year old VisionFive 2 board and being around $30 or about 35% cheaper. The StarFive VisionFive 2 though has the benefit of better upstream Linux kernel support than the Orange Pi RV2.
The Orange Pi RV2 currently doesn’t have any mainline kernel support for it or the Ky X1 SoC but hopefully with time that will change and become an upstream reality. For now Ubuntu 24.04 is the officially supported operating system of the Orange Pi RV2. There is both a headless/server build as well as a desktop image of Ubuntu 24.04 for the Orange Pi RV2 that comes complete with a working GNOME desktop environment out-of-the-box.
So with the Orange Pi RV2 you have an interesting 8-core RISC-V single board computer for ~$65 if going for the 8GB of RAM version, M.2 slots, dual Gigabit LAN, USB 3 connectivity, dual-display support, WiFi and Bluetooth, microSD card slot as an alternative to PCIe NVMe or eMMC interface, and USB Type-C power.
With the Ubuntu 24.04 image I was up and running on the Orange Pi RV2 within a matter of minutes. As easy as a Raspberry Pi for a basic desktop setup.
For getting an idea of the performance of the Orange Pi RV2, I compared its performance against recent benchmarks of the Raspberry Pi 400 (Raspberry Pi 4), Raspberry Pi 500 (Raspberry Pi 5), SiFive HiFive Unmatched, and the new SiFive HiFive Premier P550 board. At the end of the article are also benchmarks of the Orange Pi RV2 compared to the StarFive VisionFive 2. The Raspberry Pi boards were on Raspberry Pi OS, the SiFive HiFive boards on their Ubuntu 24.04 image, and the Orange Pi RV2 on its Ubuntu 24.04 image that is relying on a Linux 6.6 derived kernel.
