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

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.

Comments

Better value than RPi, but no composite video out

[calagan800xl]

Those ODroid all offer big bang for the bucks, but the Pi is one of the rare single board computers which still offers composite video output, so you can hook it up to your old fat CRT TV, which is great for old-school emulation (eg with the awesome RetroPie distro).

MPEG-2 on RPi

[SIGBUS]

Note that you have to buy a codec license to activate the Raspberry Pi's MPEG-2 support. Once you've added the license key to your config.txt, XBMC will handle MPEG-2 just fine; I can stream shows from my MythTV backend without any problem. But, the sluggish interface is a bit of a problem, especially when using an IR remote.

Re:Also, "mostly similar"?

[Obscene_CNN]

How so? ARM processors are quite plentiful and support several operating systems already. Perhaps you're just not very familiar with them. Not to worry. There's plenty of material available.

I've designed embedded computers and written boot rom code and ported kernels to arm and other processors. While arm has a more intelligent design to it than an x86 its still far behind other processors with its 16 registers (MIPS,PowerPC,etc have 32 plus a few dedicated ones). It also lacks in the fact that it must have its address space split in half to support I/O. The only thing arm does well is conserve power.