The Orange Pi RV is a minimally sized board (slightly larger than a credit card) that Chinese group Shenzhen Xunlong is debuting in promising RISC-V architecture.

Orange Pi is well known for its ARM solutions, one of the best alternatives to Raspberry Pi, which leads the SBC (single board computer) segment. The new model is special because it is based on RISC-V, the most promising project in the search for what they call an “open source processor”.

Very similar in design and size to the Orange Pi 5 Pro, with dimensions included in the Dimension 89 x 56 mmis equipped with a processor StarFive JH7110 1.5 GHz with four RV64GC CPU cores, which is the difference between the two. This CPU provides a viable platform for developers and hobbyists looking to get started with RISC-V chips as it is currently fairly well supported on other boards such as Milk-V, Pine64, Geniatech and Framework.

The Orange Pi RV can be equipped with 2, 4 or 8 GB of single-channel LPDDR4-2800 memory, has a microSD card reader and an M.2 2280 slot for PCIE 2.0 SSD-based storage.

The board offers good connectivity for its size with support for Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5 and numerous input/output components such as:

• 4 x USB 3.0 Type-A
• 1 x USB 2.0 Type-C (for power and data)
• 1 x HDMI
• 3.5mm jack for audio
• 1 Gigabit Ethernet
• 1 MIPI-DSI display connector (2 lanes)
• 1 MIPI-CSI camera connector (2 lanes)
• 40-pin GPIO header

Orange Pi has opened a page dedicated to this development and announcement on Amazon, although it has not revealed it yet a price that will be very economical in any case. The board will be Linux-compatible, and the company will offer official download links for its own Orange Pi OS images and source code on GitHub. It will also support others like Debian or Android.

It will be available soon and will be a good choice for developers, hobbyists, or just the curious looking for access to the new RISC-V hardware architecture.