The Orange Pi 6 Plus

After using the Orange Pi 6 Plus hands-on for several months, this is a review that goes beyond simple benchmarks to dig all the way into the boot chain, GPU/NPU userspace, and distro build.

• The SoC is based on the CIX P1 (CD8180/CD8160), featuring a 12-core CPU, a Mali G720 GPU, and a 3-core Zhouyi NPU.
• The test board configuration has 16GiB RAM, dual Realtek RTL8126 5GbE, and RTL8852BE Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, with the 2 ports of 5GbE being a particular strength.
• Instead of the default image, a custom Debian 13 / Trixie based image was built, with modifications aimed at /dev/kvm support, reproducible builds, standard Debian mirrors, and non-interactive kernel builds.
• Initially, the first boot was unstable due to a GRUB EFI path issue and root filesystem resize failure, but this was stabilized by fixing the build scripts and resize logic.
• Out of the box, the GPU showed either llvmpipe fallback or panvk failure, and only after aligning the vendor userspace with the kernel stack was it recognized as Mali-G720-Immortalis, with Vulkan/OpenCL working properly.
• The kernel shows 3 NPU cores, but the userspace packages are incomplete, requiring a lot of package provenance verification and manual work.
• After migrating from SD to a 512GB NVMe, boot and operation remained stable, and Docker, build-essential, clang, ninja, Bun, and a Proxmox ARM VM all ran without issues.
• In conclusion, the hardware potential is great, but its actual value depends on whether one can tolerate the difficulty of cleaning up vendor software.