Orange Pi 3 challenge Raspberry Pi with 2 GB of RAM, mPCIe and WiFi 802.11ac

The world of development boards – or development boards, if you prefer English – offers a considerable amount of choices, especially since the Raspberry Pi project was born. The latter is based on Orange Pi, which with the latest incarnation Orange Pi 3 fielding a quad-core processor coupled with the latest generation connectivity and an mPCIe slot while maintaining similar prices to the competitor with the raspberry.

The Orange Pi 3 offers an Allwinner H6 processor, equipped with four 64-bit Cortex-A53 cores operating at 1.8 GHz, which is flanked by 1 or 2 GB of RAM memory depending on the model. You can also include 8 GB of memory, and MMCed is a microSD slot.

Interesting is the connectivity offered by the card: there are indeed an HDMI 2.0a port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, WiFi 802.11ac (or WiFi 5, according to the new nomenclature) and Bluetooth 5.0. They are flanked by these four USB 3.0 ports, a USB 2.0 port, a micro-USB port (for powering or connecting USB devices via USB OTG), an eMMC slot, an mPCIe slot, an infrared receiver and an integrated microphone. There is also a GPIO header with 26 pins.

The basic model with 1 GB of RAM and no onboard memory is sold at $29.99 on AliExpress; the addition of 1 GB of RAM costs $5, and so is the addition of 8 GB of eMMC memory. This brings the model with 2 GB of RAM and the eMMC memory to cost $39.90: to make a comparison, the Raspberry Pi costs $35 and offers a quad-core processor operating at 1.4 GHz, 1 GB of DDR2 memory, four USB 2.0 ports, HDMI 1.3 and Gigabit Ethernet via USB 2.0.