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.

Comments

Choice is good, but...

[Xenna]

The Pine64 is nice as well.

But standardizing on one or two model also has its perks. Cheap cases and other peripherals, easy to find software, an abundance of tutorials.

Its starting to sound a bit like the history of the IBM PC.

Re:Choice is good, but...

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:Choice is good, but...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Blatant Advertisement

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone replaced my news with an ad for a Raspberry Pi competitor.

Re:Blatant Advertisement

[itsdapead]

They also conflated TFA (in which the RasPi 3 does pretty well in the benchmarks against current competitors) with a puff piece for a new board which isn't widely available yet (2nd TFA didn't even have a sample - they were just comparing published benchmarks).

Seriously. The ODROID C2 looks interesting - why not post a straight announcement/review that doesn't rely on knocking the RasPI to get clicks?

When will people learn?

[Dutch Gun]

It's not always about raw performance vs price. Apple wouldn't be kicking the crap out of all the other mobile players if that were true. Years ago, I remember hearing lots of disparaging remarks (here on /. mostly) about iPods, and how xyz brand was so much better because it could play Ogg Vorbis, and was hackable, had more storage for less cost, etc, etc. Where are all those players today?

Performance/price is important (although at that price point, do you really think people care all that much?), but don't forget about other factors: compatibility, community, mindshare, design, ease-of-use, reliability, and so on...

Re:When will people learn?

[serviscope_minor]

Computers like the Raspberry PI are great for start-up companies who can't afford to go to a manufacturer and have their own custom electronics made

Hi, hardware startup guy here. I'm going to come out and say that tautologically, if you know what you're doing, then doing custom hardware yourself is actually not nearly as difficult as you think.

First board design is cheap and easy. I'm using Eagle which has a free version if you want to get started, and a reasonably cheap version for smaller stuff. Everyone keeps telling me that KiCad (free) is now better than Eagle. There's of course a barrier to switching, but either way the software is cheap and easy.

Unpopulated boards are cheap to buy. There's places like Hackvana (my personal choice), OSHPark (ever used, but friends of mine like it), PCBPool (choice of a different friend, more expensive, larger minimum order than hackvana, less nice boards I think but free stencil which evens out the cost).

Either way, you can get a bunch nice double sided boards for easily under $100.

For soldering there's a bunch of choices. Best thing to do if you're interested is read some ameture tech blogs on the subject. Amazingly you can actually solder QFNs with an iron (heat gun needed for the middle pad). I didn't know that until I saw it.

I personally prefer using a stencil and solder paste. Took me about 4 hours of pasting and repasting to get the hang of it, but I can now paste cleanly every time. Then just plonk the components down and stick it in a reflow oven. If you're being cheap, a heat gun (852D+ gun/iron combos are cheap and very servicable), or a toaster oven will do. I forked out the $200 for the lowest end reflow oven (T962) and it's super easy to use. Apparently 3rd party firmware exists which improves it greatly.

I personally prefer solder paste and stencil, a reflow oven and a vacuum pickup tool (pedal controlled is much easier to use) and tweezers. That's the method used professionally for very small runs, as defined by people I know who are professionals. I know a small engineering company where they make all their custom kit like this in house, though they have spiffier irons and reflow ovens than me. Other people get by just fine with various combos of soldering irons and etc. Those are fine, but can get trick for some packages, especially larger ones.

I've been working with 0402 passives, small DFN, QFN and LGA devices and a larger CPU module (bluetooth: module because various reasons mostly FCC and time related). Others at my local hackspace have been doing double sided boards equally small with MCU, QNF and of course 0402 passives, and doing it with an iron.

I am not a pro. I did a degree with some EE in it 15-18 years ago. This is my first electronics since then and my only foray into anything more advanced than .1" DIP and a PIC mucrocontroller.

So, getting boards made is something you can do pretty cheaply and easily. If you don't feel like soldering them your self there are places that will populate them for you, though that's more expensive for short runs, but it's not bad. I got a batch of 30 small boards made, populated, shipped and exported all in for about 2 grand.

Getting started is hard. The easiest thing is to find a vendor who makes a devkit that does what you want, make sure you can get up and running on that to some extent, then base a design off the devkit. Include LEDs in the same place and once you have the LED blinking on both, you can start using your peripherals.

Re:When will people learn?

[goose-incarnated]

Computers like the Raspberry PI are great for start-up companies who can't afford to go to a manufacturer and have their own custom electronics made

Hi, hardware startup guy here. I'm going to come out and say that tautologically, if you know what you're doing, then doing custom hardware yourself is actually not nearly as difficult as you think.

First board design is cheap and easy. I'm using Eagle which has a free version if you want to get started, and a reasonably cheap version for smaller stuff.

I respectfully disagree. It might look simple if this is the first hardware project you've done, but wait till the bugs pop up, and *everything* has bugs. For my personal stuff I use the Geda toolchain, which I recommend to anyone getting their feet wet. I've designed and manufactured many devices for my personal use using Geda, but I would not recommend anyone designing their own boards - design daughterboards if you must. The reason is because you may lack the skills in figuring out what went wrong, when something eventually goes wrong (and it will!).

Small example for hardware difficulty: we've discovered problems in some of the units we manufactured last year, very inconsistent, very unpredictable and even the troublesome product would work perfectly *most* of the time. After a few months of long and hard examination of the troublesome devices (of which around 2 million, maybe, were manufactured and already sold), we finally pinned it down to a single capacitor on the device, which did not consistently withstand the washing process. The prototypes all worked perfectly (different washing process for small quantities).

This is something that will kill a small company in a year, even once you discover the problem and have a fix.

Another example (different device) involved static - even after hooking up the lightning generator and running repeated tests, it was still uncertain if it was indeed the static that was causing the problems that customers reported. The EE in charge, IIRC, added more static protection and called it a day, after more than a month of examination, testing and debugging.

In many ways, hardware is somewhat easy, especially if you have good quality 'scopes, signal generators, laboratories, etc; in other ways, it is very very difficult indeed, and there is no replacement for skilled and experienced EEs for debugging the hardware problems, which *will* arise after the prototypes all work perfectly. The best compromise is to pick a cheap module (RPi, *duino, etc) and design a daughterboard for the module that has the exact chips you need for a particular problem. That way, you can do the majority of your software testing and hardware testing from a PC connected to daughterboard, and switch to whichever SoC module suits you best.

This idiotic story has been done already

[cpm99352]

This story is at least two years old -- everyone knows that the reason to go with the Pi is the community support, not the benchmarks.

Most others miss the point

[EmperorOfCanada]

I find that so many other "competing" boards somehow miss the point. Keeping the Pi at or below $35 keeps it in the realm of disposable. 35 bucks can be put into a robot. $35 can be put into some dumb home automation system. 35 bucks can be sent to school with the kid's project. $35 can be risked in some project that might not survive.

But much more than that means that people start to ration. They don't buy multiples, they don't put it into risky situations, and they don't leave them behind as the brains of some project. To a large extent that makes any competitor that doesn't do the above a cheap crappy desktop. In that case I will just use my laptop/desktop.

The other factor is that there is generally a gradient of embedded systems. Most people are throwing Arduinos into things willy-nilly. This is because they are easy, very cheap, very low power, and really simple. There are a few more capable Arduino like boards which can do more but at a certain point people need something more capable. The raspberry pi is quite ready to step into that breach. It can run basic OpenCV, it can power things like touch screens, it can convert text to speech or the other way around. There are lots of things it can do. And it can do all of these while not rapidly draining a battery and it is fairly small.

But for most projects if the horsepower of a Pi is not enough, it is not probable that a small increase in horsepower is enough. Double or triple is not that big of a leap if you are talking about some Genetic Algorithm that needs to run in real time or some crazy complex image recognition or whatever. Thus a board that is a bit better is not really filling the gap for most people unless you buy something very expensive such as the new nVidia board but that is so far beyond the price range of the Pi as to not really be comparable.

What most people do when their Pi runs out of power is to offload the task to a desktop or laptop over some sort of data connection. Transmitting video in near real time or sensor data is not that huge a task and then you have a pile of power and might even be able to drop back to the Arduino under remote control.

Then there is the whole thing around the Pi becoming a bit of a standard. There are wonderful Python libraries well tuned for the Pi GPIO and whatnot. How well do they work with the Better-than-a-pi-board-2000? I don't know and I don't want to screw around with them for a day. Basically the Pi is pretty much going to be first in line for any ports such as ROS.

So if someone wants to compete with the Pi they need to understand that this is not a desktop war where some extra memory or a few more Hz is going to win my heart. A great example of a competitor that caught my attention is the C.H.I.P. for $9. It pretty much meets all the above requirements in spades. Now the completeness of the Pi with BLE and whatnot is pretty attractive but in many cases I could use the horsepower of the CHIP and the rest would be wasted. Thus I can see a future where I have 5-10 CHIPS in my toolbox, and 3-4 Pis. I don't see a future for a $60+ board in my toolkit. Literally the next step beyond a pi will be something that is effectively a small desktop, even if it needs to be an embedded system.

Re:Most others miss the point

[fnj]

I agree in general. However ...

First of all $40-42 (Odroid-C2) is not a significant hurdle beyond $35 (Pi). Sure, all the stuff that is $60 and up completely misses the boat.

The area where both the Pi and the Odroid-C2 fall down is that you MUST add the cost of a microSD card and the bother of installing to it. The Beaglebone Green ($39) with 4GB eMMC built in is ready to go when you receive it with no additional pieces (though there is a microSD slot if you want it). Plug it into a PC (they even furnish the USB cable) and its preinstalled Debian springs to life and you can work with it over a browser via the USB gadget networking. And there are 2 wonderful Grove connectors built in. What you don't get is any kind of video interface, and only a single USB host. So it's not trying to be a Pi me-too. It fills a different niche. The one where you have the Groves and 92 pins of 0.1-inch IO headers and dedicated IO processors.

In every respect except IO physical pinout, the PJRC Teensy 3.2 beats the Arduino all to hell at its own game. It gives you hella power and Arduino IDE support with a Cortex-M4 CPU.

Re:ODROID always kicked ass

[Gaygirlie]

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.

Not news, astroturf

[goombah99]

Everybody knows that the Rasberry PI is never the fastest or cheapest or most featured. It's still the best in terms of support and constancy of design available accessories and an the likelihood of a path forward for things built in one generation to work on the next. It also now even runs windows, has embedded or server versions and a large range of price points. SO yeah we all know there's things like Pine and Orange Pi and Bannana PI and orroid and beagle bone circling the trade-space of the raspberry. And I even enjoy articles comparing these. But singling out one of these for headline space on Slashdot is just blantant astro turfing.