This is a multi-part blog looking at Orange Pi single board computers (SBC) running Linux.

I benchmark the Orange Pi 5 Ultra, Orange Pi 5 Max, Orange Pi RV2 against a Raspberry Pi 5 and a DreamQuest N100 Mini PC. The tests are run using the Phoronix Test Suite.

What’s the rationale of benchmarking the Orange Pi SBCs against an N100? Simple! This series is looking at using the Orange Pi’s range as desktop machines, and the N100 is a hugely popular Intel processor found in many low-cost mini PCs.

Normally when I benchmark a machine, I look at benchmarks that focus on system performance, processor, memory/graphics, disk/WiFi. But the SBCs don’t come with a disk. Testing things like disk performance therefore seems inappropriate.

The Orange PI RV2 uses the open-source RISC-V. It’s great that RISC-V is becoming more accessible but it’s still fairly early days. With the current generation, the RV2 is focusing on developers, tinkerers and hobbysists to develop on RISC-V. The peripheral set and performance aren’t yet competitive with ARM and Intel chips.

When viewing these benchmarks, it’s important to take into account the price points of each single board computer (SBC). Let’s take the 8GB model of each SBC. Here in the UK, the Raspberry Pi 5 retails at £79.00, the Orange Pi 5 Ultra at £89.39, the Orange Pi Ultra at £89.79, and the OrangePi RV2 at £67.39.

I’ll just focus on processor and memory benchmarks. Note the OPi5 Ultra and OPi5 Max from a benchmark perspective should obtain identical results. The fact that there is a slight divergence is just the standard variance you see from running benchmarks (even using averaged figures).

Processor benchmarks

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark smallpt

Smallpt is a C++ global illumination renderer written in less than 100 lines of code. Global illumination is done via unbiased Monte Carlo path tracing and there is multi-threading support via the OpenMP library.

With this benchmark, a shorter time indicates better performance. The Orange Pi 5 Ultra and Max comfortably beat both the Raspberry Pi 5 and Intel N100. While the RISC-V RV2 has 8 cores (and this test uses all the cores) it’s not performant. But bear in mind it’s a cheaper board and RISC-V is still maturing compared to ARM and Intel.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark compress-pbzip2

This test measures the time needed to compress a file (a .tar package of the Linux kernel source code) using BZIP2 compression.

With this benchmark, a shorter time indicates better performance. The N100 edges this benchmark although the Orange Pi 5 Max and Ultra comfortably beat the Raspberry Pi 5 by a considerable margin.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark stockfish

I wanted to benchmark with crafty, but it’s not available in the Phoronix Suite for the ARM architecture. Instead I’ll use Stockfish, an advanced open-source high performance and scalable C++ chess benchmark. The RV2 didn’t complete the benchmark.

Again the N100 achieves the better benchmark, but the Orange Pi 5 Max and Ultra score more than double the number of nodes per second compared to the Raspberry Pi 5.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark coremark

Coremark is a benchmark that measures the performance of central processing units (CPU) used in embedded systems.

The Orange Pi 5 Max and Ultra push the N100 extremely close, and are comfortably faster than the Raspberry Pi 5.

Memory benchmarks

The RV2 didn’t complete the memory benchmarks.

RAMspeed tests the system memory (RAM) performance. Here are the results of its integer tests.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark ramspeed

Here are the results of its floating-point tests.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark ramspeed

In both tests, the OrangePi 5 Max and Ultra comfortably beat the other machines. A good result.

In the next set of articles, I’ll look at the power consumption of the Orange PI single board computers.

All articles in each series: