$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

set its sites

[amalcolm]

Arggh ... set its sights FFS

Re:set its sites

[Halifax Samuels]

Maybe they finalized their webpages about it.

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).

Re:XBMC Finally?

[CastrTroy]

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.

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:Can it run Flash?

[Cajun Hell]

As long as it's behind a decent firewall you shouldn't have any problems.

Yes, up to now, Windows has mainly been attacked by Hackers(TM) connecting to its daemons' ports, because Windows sysadmins forget to turn off all its services. It's an old story: mom forgot to uncheck "share passwords" or "be an open mail relay" and it's true that a firewall will help with those kinds of problems.

But what if Windows ever grows out of its mainly-for-servers role and gets popular on the desktop? Can you imagine what sort of problems might appear if people start using that OS to run web browsers or read email? A lot of good firewalls will do then. Sure, 2014 may be Yet Another Year of Linux on the desktop, but what about 2015?

Raspberry Pi is not open source hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.