The same Armv9 silicon that put Radxa's Orion O6 on the map now has a second home. Orange Pi has built the Orange Pi 6 around the CIX P1 (CD8180), a TSMC 6nm chip with four Cortex-A720 big cores at up to 2.6 GHz, four A720 medium cores at 2.4 GHz, and four Cortex-A520 efficiency cores at 1.8 GHz, paired with an Arm Immortalis-G720 MC10 GPU that does hardware ray tracing and speaks Vulkan 1.3, OpenGL ES 3.2, and OpenCL 3.0. It lands roughly 3x to 4x faster than the Broadcom BCM2712 in the Raspberry Pi 5, and it does so on a board measuring just 90 x 90mm (3.5 x 3.5 inches) and weighing 106 grams (3.7 oz).

This is a denser, lighter take on the earlier 115 x 100mm (4.5 x 3.9 inches) Orange Pi 6 Plus. The trade-offs are two 2.5GbE ports in place of the Plus model's dual 5GbE, no LiPo battery support, and memory capped at 8GB to 24GB of 128-bit LPDDR5 (a 32GB option was mentioned by email but is absent from the spec sheet). Storage and expansion stay generous: two M.2 M-Key PCIe Gen4 x4 2280 slots that can take NVMe SSDs or AI accelerators, an M.2 E-Key socket for an optional Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module, a microSD slot, and 64Mbit of SPI NAND. The NPU is rated at 28.85 TOPS on its own and 45 TOPS combined across CPU, GPU, and NPU, with INT4/INT8/INT16, FP16/BF16, and TF32 support. Display output runs to HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.4 at up to 4Kp120, two USB-C ports with DisplayPort Alt Mode, and an eDP connector, and the VPU decodes 8Kp60 AV1, H.265, and VP9. The board is powered over USB-C at 20V/5A, and the 40-pin GPIO header carries the usual UART, I2C, SPI, and PWM.

The software story is where this platform has moved fastest. CIX has been steadily upstreaming the P1 through its mainline kernel tree, with basic device tree, mailbox, UART, and clock support landing around Linux 6.17 and I2C, SPI, pinctrl, and PCIe queued for 6.18 and 6.19. Canonical published Ubuntu 26.04 concept images for CIX P1 boards built on a Linux 7.0-based kernel drawn from those open-source patches, and Debian 13 runs on the chip through the CIX community driver stack, so the open-source path is real rather than aspirational. In practice, hands-on experience with the same P1 silicon in the Orange Pi 6 Plus, reviewed at Tao of Mac, shows that CIX's vendor kernel (6.6-cix) is the current stable baseline for full peripheral access, and moving to a more recent mainline tree means giving up HDMI output above 1080p and NPU support for now. Community developers have been working around those limits: a GPU bring-up project for the Orange Pi 6 Plus documented enabling the Immortalis-G720 under the in-tree Panthor driver by switching from ACPI to device-tree boot, resolving a probing gap the mainline driver does not bridge on its own. The Zhouyi NPU has a community-adapted DKMS module for Armbian that has run CLIP and YOLOv8n inference under kernel 6.18, though the NPU userspace is gated on CIX's closed-source NOE SDK, which the community has formally asked CIX to open-source. On the Orion O6, which shares the P1 chip, llama.cpp has been run over the Vulkan path, though inference throughput is constrained by the iGPU sharing LPDDR5 bandwidth with the CPU. Orange Pi lists Debian, Ubuntu, Android, Windows, OpenHarmony, and ROS2 for the Orange Pi 6, though full driver coverage varies and Windows 11 in particular will not be complete. For now the documentation page's OS image links still point to empty Google Drive folders.

Pricing starts at $240 (€220) for the 8GB model and climbs through $270 (€247) for 12GB, $320 (€290) for 16GB, and $400 (€368) for 24GB, up to $570 (€520) for the listed 32GB tier, each bundle including a cooling fan. RAM prices are elevated across the industry in 2026, which accounts for much of the spread. Orange Pi separately offers a 65W power supply for standard workloads and a 100W unit for heavier peripheral loads, the latter being the safer pick for a fully populated board.