Orange Pi has detailed the OrangePi O1, a compact SBC built around the Sophgo BM1688 processor that pairs an integrated 16-TOPS INT8 neural accelerator with enough I/O to function as a serious edge computing node. Orange Pi explicitly lists support for running Transformer-based models locally, including Llama2-7B and Qwen1.5-1.8B, positioning the 9 x 7 cm (3.5 x 2.8 in) board as a self-contained platform for on-device LLM inference.

The BM1688 is an unusual SoC that combines eight Arm Cortex-A53 cores clocked at up to 1.65 GHz with a RISC-V C906 coprocessor running at up to 1.2 GHz. Its TPU delivers 32 TOPS at INT4, 16 TOPS at INT8, and 4.0 TFLOPS at FP16/BF16, with Sophgo listing framework support for PyTorch, TensorFlow, ONNX, Caffe, and MXNet. The board ships with up to 16 GB of LPDDR4/LPDDR4X memory and offers flexible storage through optional eMMC (up to 128 GB), a microSD slot, an M.2 M-Key for PCIe 3.0 NVMe drives, and a SATA 3.0 port. Power is supplied via USB-C at 20V/3.25A.

Sophgo maintains a growing set of open-source tools for deploying models on the BM1688. The LLM-TPU repository handles deployment of large language and vision-language models on BM1688 hardware, while tpu-mlir provides an MLIR-based compiler for converting and quantizing models for the TPU. Sophgo also publishes open-source media libraries covering FFmpeg, GStreamer, and OpenCV integration. Mainline Linux kernel support for the BM1688 has not yet landed, though Sophgo's other RISC-V SoCs like the SG2044 have begun appearing in upstream kernel patches as of Linux 6.16, suggesting the company is actively engaging with the upstream process.

Connectivity is generous for a board this size. Dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.3 cover networking, while an M.2 B-Key slot accepts optional 4G or 5G cellular modules. Display output comes via HDMI 2.0 at up to 4K60 and a four-lane MIPI-DSI interface, with two four-lane MIPI-CSI connectors for cameras. The board rounds out its I/O with two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 host ports, dual CAN bus interfaces, RS485, a 26-pin GPIO header exposing UART, I2C, SPI, and PWM, and onboard audio with a headphone jack, speaker output, and electret microphone input.

Orange Pi has not announced pricing or a release date for the O1.