The Orange Pi 6 Plus sits in the rack, humming along with the quiet confidence of a board that knows it is being underutilised. Inside the CIX P1 SoC is a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU)—a piece of silicon specifically etched to crunch tensors and accelerate inference.
700ms. That was the number that haunted my Kubernetes cluster, slowly burning it to the ground. Every alert the cluster generated, every log line it processed for AI-driven feedback, triggered an embedding operation.
