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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.
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.'"
The Odroid uses that god-awful Mali GPU for 3D, which means there isn't and will never be an open-source display-driver, you'll just be stuck with an unaccelerated framebuffer for X. The RPi is at least doing some progress in that area, including being able to run actual OpenGL with the open-source driver instead of only GLES. Basically, the Odroid is great if you only want to do headless stuff with it, but the RPi has a brighter future if your needs include graphics.
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.