A 90 x 90 mm single-board computer that runs Ubuntu, Debian, and a mainline-bound Linux kernel while carrying up to 24GB of LPDDR5 is the shape of the new Orange Pi 6, the compact sibling to the previously teased Orange Pi 6 Plus. Both are built on the CIX CD8180 (also marketed as the CIX P1), a 12-core Armv9 SoC, but the standard model trades the Plus board's larger layout for a square form factor with dual 2.5GbE networking and a 106 g weight.

The CD8180 pairs a tri-cluster CPU (four Cortex-A720 big cores, four Cortex-A720 medium cores, and four Cortex-A520 efficiency cores, per SBCWiki) with an Arm Immortalis-G720 MC10 GPU and a dedicated NPU. The GPU supports Vulkan 1.3, OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 3.0, hardware ray tracing, and 8K decode, while Orange Pi rates the NPU at up to 28.8 TOPS and the whole package at up to 45 TOPS of combined AI compute across CPU, GPU, and NPU. Memory comes in 8GB, 16GB, and 24GB configurations on a 128-bit bus running up to 6400 MT/s.

For a board this size, the storage and I/O loadout is unusually deep. Two M.2 Key-M 2280 slots each take an NVMe SSD over PCIe 4.0 x4, alongside a MicroSD slot and 64 Mbit of SPI flash. Display output spans DisplayPort 1.4 at up to 4K120, HDMI 2.0 at 4K60 through a PS185 bridge, eDP, and DisplayPort over two full-function USB-C ports, plus two 4-lane MIPI-CSI camera inputs. Wired networking is handled by the two 2.5GbE ports, with an M.2 Key-E socket left open for an optional Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 module. The rest of the panel covers two USB 3.0 host ports, two USB 2.0 ports, the two USB-C 3.0 connectors, a 40-pin GPIO header, and PWM fan, RTC, and UART debug headers. Dual USB-C PD inputs at 20V accept 65W or 100W adapters.

The software picture is where the CIX P1 has moved fastest. Orange Pi lists OpenHarmony, Debian, Ubuntu, Android, Windows, and ROS 2 support, and Canonical has published an Ubuntu Concept image based on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS with a Linux 7.0 kernel derived from CIX's open-source tree. That image ships using only open-source drivers, with the out-of-tree patch set intended to eventually reach mainline. CIX has already begun upstreaming the SKY1 SoC, with basic device tree, UART, clock, and mailbox support merged in v6.17-rc1, I2C and I3C following in v6.18-rc1, and SPI, Pinctrl, PCIe, and HDA targeting v6.19-rc1. Mainline Linux 6.19 boots to a serial console with NVMe support already functional, though display output, audio, GPU acceleration, and networking still depend on out-of-tree patches. CIX distributes DKMS modules for the NPU and VPU on top of kernel 7.0, and the community Sky1-Linux organization adds a mali_kbase GPU driver packaged via DKMS from ARM Mali DDK sources, alongside a Mesa fork with PanVK fixes targeting the Mali-G720. Canonical's tested-systems list includes the Orange Pi 6 Plus, the Radxa Orion O6 and O6N, the Minisforum MS-R1, and MetaComputing's AI PC, though the Concept build is a developer preview rather than a production release.

Orange Pi has not announced pricing or availability, but the Orange Pi 6 product page is already live.