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Raspberry Pi 3 Is a Nice Upgrade, But Alternatives Exist With Faster Performance (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: With the Raspberry Pi 3 now available, benchmarks have been done comparing the Raspberry Pi 3 to other ARM SBCs. The Raspberry Pi 3 was found to be a faster upgrade compared to the Raspberry Pi 2, but the ODROID-C2 is a much faster alternative. For only $5 more than the Raspberry Pi 3, it includes twice the amount of RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, and a faster SoC. The ODROID-C2 also has HDMI 2.0 and superior Ethernet while the Raspberry Pi 3 has an advantage of 802.11n WiFi. The ODROID-C2 also has a heatsink for ensuring the SoC doesn't get as toasty as the Raspberry Pi 3.
ODROID-C2 is real 64-bit rather than having 64-bit capable CPU but only 32-bit kernel and userland with the raspi team announcing that in several months they'll "consider" whether making 64-bit drivers is worth it.
And the performance difference is MASSIVE. I own an ODROID-U2 and its contemporary RPi 1b -- even when overclocking the latter, Odroid wins in compile times by a factor of ~16, and that's assuming raspi won't start swapping due to its miniscule RAM. For a disk, Odroid can use either microSD or their fancy eMMC -- the latter is more expensive but drastically faster. And 100Mbit vs 1Gbit ethernet is not a negligible difference either.
The only upside of raspi is that it ships from nearby countries (UK, US) while shipping Odroid from Korea means unpleasant mucking with the customs.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Indeed. The Pi sucks badly interface-wise. Still not fixed on the Pi3, because they stay with an inferior Broadcom SoC. Get real USB and real networking instead of the unreliable crap the Pi has. And some competitors even have SATA.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It's not really true. What's true is that there is no working OSS driver for Mali. PoC has been done (ISTR Quake 3 running) but there's nothing you could actually count on. Most of the driver is closed-source, and provided by ARM only to Mali licensors. The wrapper bits are open source.
It's also true that more effort is put into Android video support than Linux support because the majority of the Mali customers are running Android.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In that vein, the current pain-point for the ODroid-2 is the fact that the AMLogic S905 SoC it is based on has no mainline kernel support; and the current vendor fork is of a version heading toward EOL uncomfortably quickly. There is supposed to be a mainlining effort that will fix this before the current option actually goes EOL; but that remains to be seen.
I must admit that (having come into linux back in the delightful days when Broadcom wireless meant screwing around with NDISwrapper) it's a bit of a shock; but the rPi actually has an atypically high plays-well-with-others factor. You can get them cheaper; and you can get them better; but until the 'every ARM SoC is its own dysfunctional port' issue gets ironed out, some very promising hardware can end up hobbled by neurotic and antique software.
I agree. It is always harder than it looks. Again from a EE that works in the embedded space.
If you are doing a carrier board design and use one of a few readily available modules like the Raspberry Pi Compute Module then check out Gumstix's Geppetteo, https://www.gumstix.com/geppetto/. You can design a carrier board using a drag and drop web interface. There is a flat, up front fee and then a per board fee that is cheaper than going to a production house. Very little electronics background needed. Forces a workable design before anything can be produced.
There are a few articles on Electronic Design's website, Best of 2015: Create Custom Capes Fast and Easy, http://electronicdesign.com/boards/best-2015-create-custom-capes-fast-and-easy.
I own both a Pi and a C1+ and you're right that it's hit and miss, but Kodi works perfectly fine. If you're trying to run software that nobody has ever compiled for the Pi, it's usually easier to compile it on the C1. Due to the Pi's unique hardware, it can be really difficult to get certain projects to run. The best example of this may be Android, which runs just fine on the C1, but on the Pi there are only experimental versions that don't have hardware acceleration and can't run most apps, let alone something like the Netflix app.
I'm really hoping that more people start using Odroid, because except for the tiny community it's actually really nice.
Don't forget that the profits from the Raspberry PI's go to helping children and people who don't have access to technology to get access to it. The foundation helps these people learn how to program and "tinker" with electronics.
As an owner of a C1+ who was convinced to get it because of the advantages noted here, let me just put out a little warning...
The ODroid is certainly an excellent machine, with excellent performance for the price. It is, however, only usable for the most mainstream uses - web servers, etc.
That's because the OS for the C series is maintained by ODroid, and is based on a *very old kernel*, old as in something like four or five years. They have ported the upper layers of the OS onto it, so that's only two or three years old. The result is a bizarre hybrid system that is highly outdated in terms of hardware support.
So if you, like I, are looking for something that you'll plug hardware into, please make absolutely sure you talk to someone with that hardware plugged into that board. If you do not, you may convince yourself, as I did, that it will work only to find nothing does. In my case, I wanted to run TVHeadend with a U235 stick, which is fully supported by Linux versions older than what comes on the C+. However, the kernel itself is older and has no drivers for almost the entire LinuxTV stack.
Then to top it all off, there are no APIs for the processor's media acceleration facilities, so all media flows through the basic processor. This actually ends up making it many times slower than a RPi at basic video tasks, in spite of being much more powerful on paper.
Support is basically self-hosting. There are some really great guys in the forums, but don't expect anything even remotely like the level of self-support you might see on the RPi boards.
So basically, if you know *exactly* what you want to do with it, and *know for a fact* it works, the ODroid's are great. If not, I would strongly recommend buying a RPi.