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$35 Quad-core Hacker SBC Offers Raspberry Pi-like Size and I/O

Posted by Soulskill on from the more-competition-more-innovation dept.

DeviceGuru writes: Hardkernel has again set its sights on the Raspberry Pi with a new $35 Odroid-C1 hacker board that matches the RPI's board size and offers a mostly similar 40-pin expansion connector. Unlike the previous $30 Odroid-W that used the same Broadcom BCM2835 SoC as the Pi and was soon cancelled due to lack of BCM2835 SoC availability, the Odroid-C1 is based on a quad-core 1.5GHz Cortex-A5 based Amlogic S805 SoC, which integrates the Mali-400 GPU found on Allwinner's popular SoCs. Touted advantages over the similarly priced Raspberry Pi Model B+ include a substantially more powerful processor, double the RAM, an extra USB2.0 port that adds Device/OTG, and GbE rather than 10/100 Ethernet.

3 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. set its sites by amalcolm · · Score: 5, Informative

    Arggh ... set its sights FFS

    --
    Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
  2. Re:XBMC Finally? by CastrTroy · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Raspberry Pi is kind of in a weird situation, and I can't understand why it really caught on. On one hand, it's overkill for little electronics projects where something like an Arduino would be much better suited. On the other hand, it's not quite powerful enough to act as a respectable desktop or media center. The disk I/O is very lacking because it doesn't support an interace with DMA. Various disk intensive applications like torrents will bring the thing to its knees. If the video doesn't happen to be in a codec that is supported in hardware, then there's no chance of it having the horsepower to decode it.

    As far as media centers go, It makes way more sense to get a low power Intel board that you know will have enough power to do everything, and will be able to run just about any application and run Windows or Linux as you prefer.

    --

    Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  3. Raspberry Pi is not open source hardware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Most of the competitors to the pi are junk. They're unsupported, not open source.

    The Raspberry Pi is not open source hardware, it never has been. You can't even get the gerbers nor full documentation on the Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, let alone the full design files.

    In contrast, competing boards like Beaglebone Black and Olimex's OLinuXino range like the A10-OLinuXino-LIME, A20-OLinuXino-LIME and A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 are fully open source hardware with all the information being provided. In the best tradition of open source, everyone is welcome to make their own derivatives using these open materials. All four boards are also substantially more powerful and flexible than the RasPi, very well made and fully supported.

    The Raspberry Pi Foundation has declined to make the RasPi open source hardware despite years of requests from the community.