An in-depth review of the Orange Pi 6 Plus, featuring the CIX P1 SoC with 12 ARM cores, Mali G720 GPU, and a three-core NPU. The author built a custom Debian 13 (Trixie) OS image from scratch, fixing boot chain issues, GPU driver rebinding, and NPU userspace fragmentation. Performance testing focused on local LLM inference across four runtimes (llama.cpp Vulkan, ik_llama.cpp, PowerInfer, CPU baseline) and multiple models. The best practical result was Qwen3.5 4B Q4_K_M on llama.cpp Vulkan at ~9.7 tok/s generation, after patching a Mali Vulkan descriptor-set exhaustion bug and tuning micro-batch size to -ub 8. Power consumption averages 15.5W idle — higher than comparable SBCs — and fan noise is significant. After a month of daily use including AArch64 JIT development and AI assistant workloads, the board proved stable but requires substantial software effort to unlock its capabilities.
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