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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.
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.