With at least a couple more years to go before the release of the Raspberry Pi 6, people who need a single-board computer upgrade now have to look elsewhere. It’s hard to beat the Raspberry Pi developer ecosystem, but if you don’t mind a few rough edges, you can easily score more powerful hardware. Take the new Orange Pi 6, for instance. It comes equipped with a 12-core processor, a neural processing unit (NPU), and up to 24GB of RAM. All of this is packed into a board barely larger than a credit card.

The Orange Pi 6 is built around the CIX CD8180 processor. This chip combines four Cortex-A720 performance cores, four Cortex-A720 medium cores, and four Cortex-A520 efficiency cores for a total of twelve Arm CPU cores. That already puts it well beyond what most maker-focused single-board computers offer today, but there are still many more features packed into this board.

The system can deliver up to 45 TOPS of total AI compute by combining the processing power of its CPU, GPU, and NPU. The dedicated NPU alone is rated for up to 28.8 TOPS, making the board suitable for running AI workloads locally without relying on cloud services. Potential applications include on-device large language model inference, robotics, industrial automation, smart cameras, and edge AI systems.

The integrated GPU supports hardware ray tracing and 8K video decoding, while display connectivity includes HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.4, eDP, and DisplayPort output over USB Type-C. Depending on the interface used, the board can drive displays at resolutions up to 4K at 120 Hz.

Memory options include 8GB, 16GB, and 24GB of LPDDR5 running at speeds of up to 6400 MT/s. As far as storage support is concerned, there are two PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 Key-M slots for NVMe SSDs. A microSD card slot and onboard SPI flash provide additional storage options.

For networking, the board includes dual 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports and an M.2 Key-E slot for an optional Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 module. Additional connectivity includes USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports, dual full-function USB Type-C connectors, dual MIPI CSI camera interfaces, audio input and output, and a familiar 40-pin GPIO header for hardware projects.

Despite all of those features, the board measures just 90 x 90 mm and weighs 106 grams. Orange Pi says it supports OpenHarmony, Debian, Ubuntu, Android, Windows, and ROS 2, making it suitable for everything from home servers and network attached storage systems to autonomous robots and industrial controllers.

Orange Pi has not yet announced a release date for the board, but since the product page is live, it would be expected to launch fairly soon. There is no word on pricing, either — and considering how expensive computing components are lately, you'd better brace yourself for a shock just in case.