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Odroid C2 Challenges Raspberry Pi 3 On Hardware But Not Ecosystem (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: We are surely in the age of single-board computers as the words "Raspberry Pi" sneak into the ranks of [a] household name. Many would have thought this impossible, but for hardware enthusiasts it has wide-reaching benefits as others clamor to enter the market. The most formidable challenge made so far is by the Hardkernel Odroid C2 which bests the Pi 3 on hardware, but not everything. Odroid C2 has the same cores, running faster with more RAM. It swaps out gigabit Ethernet for the Pi 3's somewhat unimpressive Wi-Fi chip. And it includes onboard eMMC (useful for faster booting) as well as an SD card slot. Odroid C2's hardware is clearly a better offering than Pi 3 for just $5 more (as we saw from the benchmarks last week), but that's not the entire story. It's further down Linux stream for a less mature distro, and has nowhere near the community support that has opened the Pi [up] to just about everyone. But it is the hardware geek's SBC with the layman's price tag and that's a very interesting indicator of where we are with low-cost computing.
I presume someone either owns shares or gets paid to push this second rate SBC ?
The PC has superior hardware at a higher cost and... eh... oh wait.
Never mind.
(posted from Macmini4,1)
dmbasso@raspi ~ $ uptime
20:03:06 up 399 days, 20:50, 1 user, load average: 0.03, 0.07, 0.06
Booting speed is not an issue to me. :)
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Even disregarding the community aspect, Odroid runs a weirdo/old software stack. If it was running something more akin to Raspbian which is pretty close to mainline Debian, i would be more interested in it. I dont even like using Adafruit's custom raspbian images they provide with their ~3" TFT screens.
Good-bye
How is swapping out wifi with no add-on board (PI 3) for a wired interface an improvement?? For $5 extra?
Pi 3 is targeting stuff that is useful. Built in wifi, relatively modern linux base etc.
And if its not good enough wait 6 months for the next version.
Actual link to the Odroid C2 vs Raspberri Pi 3 comparison:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...
RPi is a video capture/processing chip (Broadcom VideoCore) with an ARM co-processor. Compresses, manipulates, and streams Full HD input video in real-time.
ODroid has no video input at all (the product page suggests getting a USB camera which performs its own compression, because the ODroid could never keep up)
Ok, probably most users care more about the general-purpose ARM cores and Linux than the VideoCore, but it's just wrong to say that ODroid "has the same cores but faster", when the biggest portion of BCM2837, the VideoCore, is completely absent from the ODroid.
What the fuck is this about?
If you don't understand the value of competition, and if you don't realize that it's the continual pressure by competitors on the Pi Foundation that motivates them to make new products, then you must be one hell of a blinkered Pi fanboi.
Summary: it's for your own benefit, even if you don't see that.
The community made it the first ARM SBC that supports HEVC hardware decoding for Moonlight-Embedded (Nvidia GameStream).
https://github.com/irtimmer/moonlight-embedded/commit/c1f5a2a30ec89a8d3a1d5843b3df53f82dc8df41
Is having root on a Raspberry Pi even worth the effort to login?
While your points are not wrong they are irrelevant to about 96% of all SBC buyers.
Ok, probably most users care more about the general-purpose ARM cores and Linux than the VideoCore, but it's just wrong to say that ODroid "has the same cores but faster", when the biggest portion of BCM2837, the VideoCore, is completely absent from the ODroid.
Interesting to know, as I am one of said users, and as a this actually makes me more likely to consider an ODroid C2.
How are things like wifi, bluetooth, and video something that is "irrelevant" to 96% of buyers?
The old / clunky software these things run? How is that irrelevant?
You can't do a comparison and ignore the features that make Pi 3 popular. Oh look, this core runs faster, but there is no wifi, no bluetooth, no good video handling, no up to date software etc etc.
Higher Specs look good on paper, but are not nearly as important as stability and well written software. I have the original version that looked amazing next to the pi 2. But it crashes all the time and the only video player that works on it is Kodi.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Slashdot article:
"It's further down Linux stream for a less mature distro, and has nowhere near the community support that has opened the Pi [up] to just about everyone."
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=raspberry-pi3-odroid2: ... officially supports Ubuntu and Android."
"The ODROID-C2
Sure, we're talking about the ARM ports of Ubuntu, but "less mature" ???
One possible metric:
$ wget -q -O - http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/dists/wily/main/binary-arm64/Packages.bz2 | bzcat | grep ^Package | wc -l
8482
$ wget -q -O - http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/wily/main/binary-amd64/Packages.bz2 | bzcat | grep ^Package | wc -l
8810
The ability to run a stable, vendor-supported Android distribution, with working hardware acceleration, gives ODROID boards (along with many competing products) a much larger software selection than RPi. Last I heard, graphics acceleration is possible on the RPi 2 but not production-ready. And that was a month or two ago.
Although the most distinctive feature of the ODROID boards is perhaps their proprietary (and expensive) eMMC storage socket and cards. It's significantly faster than using a microSD card but at $21 for 8GB and $42 for 32GB very expensive. If the SoCs found on SBCs had faster SD card support (UHS-II bus?), it might not be such an advantage. Or if they had USB3 and could boot off that -- SanDisk has a line of USB3 flash drives that are actually high-quality SATA SSDs paired with a USB-SATA bridge. $22 gets you 32 GB and it's much faster than any microSD card. I use them as boot devices on Linux boxes
If you're paying close to $100 for a board+case+32 GB fast storage, you might also consider one of the various low-power Atom SoC-based systems, if it fits your application. There are a few different form factors available, with compute sticks probably being the most popular. Some run on 5V 2A microUSB just like many of the ARM SBCs do. You won't find any GPIO connector but for ~$100 you can find systems with faster Atom quad-core CPU, 2GB RAM, 16-32 GB onboard eMMC, USB3, etc. Some of those systems have poor Linux support today, and few vendors actually choose to provide Android as an option despite Intel having done much of the porting/packaging work required)
The post had nothing about the bistro, wifi or bluetooth and most people never use the video capture feature of their Pi. Actually, I've never seen a single person use one and the makers designs that incorporate it are few and far between. If you meant to make a broader point then you fucking failed like a little retard.
It seems to me that the barriers to entering the "community" are pretty low. As a baby step the ODroid could have put the connectors and mounting holes in the same place as an Rpi, that would at least have made it possible to use some of the mechanical accessories, like enclosures and maybe even some of the more exotic accessories like GPIO breakout cables.
I don't see any other small form factors getting much traction, it's not as if there are lots of vendors making mobile-itx form factor boards and enclosures. Which is a shame, because they might have been better thought out if there had been more input at the design stage from a variety of vendors
Nullius in verba
The Odroid is GIGABIT ethernet, sparky. The Pi isn't even really a fully capable 100 Mb. It is hanging off the same terrible chip that implements the USBs. At least that's the promise of the Odroid. The Odroid hardware QC is so shaky, however, I've avoided trying it so far.
Considering the power of the hardware I don't see much of a bottle neck with the Pi. Gig ethernet would probably not be that noticeable on that platform. Speed isn't really it's thing. It's just fast enough. Just.
I think they both have their own audience. At this price point you'll never make everyone happy with one board.
RPi is a video capture/processing chip (Broadcom VideoCore) with an ARM co-processor. Compresses, manipulates, and streams Full HD input video in real-time.
ODroid has no video input at all (the product page suggests getting a USB camera which performs its own compression, because the ODroid could never keep up)
Ok, probably most users care more about the general-purpose ARM cores and Linux than the VideoCore, but it's just wrong to say that ODroid "has the same cores but faster", when the biggest portion of BCM2837, the VideoCore, is completely absent from the ODroid.
Incorrect. The Odroid-C2 uses the Amlogic S905 SoC which does have a built-in encoding/decoding block. It supports much higher resolutions and framerates than RPi, including formats the RPi's Videocore IV doesn't support at all; Videocore IV doesn't support e.g. HEVC, let alone 10-bit HEVC, whereas the S905 does do both.
I have the slightly older Odroid C1, which competes against the PI2. Gigabit is definitely noticeable, and it quite happily saturates the Gigabit link well before saturating the CPU. It performs well enough that I can use the Odroid as low cost, low power file server.
RPi is a video capture/processing chip (Broadcom VideoCore) with an ARM co-processor. Compresses, manipulates, and streams Full HD input video in real-time.
As opposed to 4K video at 60 fps on the ODroid? Depending on how to slice that up you should be able to transcode 2 or 4 Full HD streams at 30 fps at the same time.
ODroid has no video input at all (the product page suggests getting a USB camera which performs its own compression, because the ODroid could never keep up)
This has to do with bandwidth on USB. Doing 4k screen grabs over USB at 30 or 60 FPS ain't gonna happen. Unless you have a dedicated path to offload the data to the VPU you can't even feed it fast enough to do anything remotely useful.
Ok, probably most users care more about the general-purpose ARM cores and Linux than the VideoCore, but it's just wrong to say that ODroid "has the same cores but faster", when the biggest portion of BCM2837, the VideoCore, is completely absent from the ODroid.
Hardware wise the ODroid is a bargain. ... to be honest hardkernel doesn't have a good track record with Exynos but perhaps they will get better support through Amlogic.
Fitness for use is up to each application.
Software support
And to be fair Broadcom is still one of the worst chip vendors when it comes to specs and support. What makes the RPi anything but DoA is the community that formed around the ultra cheap platform. So while RPi is riding the wave there is lots of room for a new player in the mid-range but low cost hobbyist market.
As opposed to 4K video at 60 fps on the ODroid? Depending on how to slice that up you should be able to transcode 2 or 4 Full HD streams at 30 fps at the same time.
You're mixing up encoding and decoding. The S905 can't encode at 4K @ 60FPS, it only does 1080p @ 60 FPS encoding.
Win some lose some. That chip is a bit of a bottleneck for other things (USB, ethernet) and is the reason the Pi has a 1GB memory ceiling - so if you care about the video it's wonderful and if you don't care it's worth using something else if you want to use it for something that hits limits.
The Odroid hardware QC is so shaky, however, I've avoided trying it so far.
Last I checked they were offering a whopping 30 days warranty on these SBCs. That's not a sign of confidence in the product.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Oh yes, yes it is : https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
Elok
I did a simple apt-get dist-upgrade and bricked the stupid thing.
I did an apt-get dist-upgrade and did not brick the stupid thing.
Also, "brick" means that you can't recover it unless you use complicated procedures like unsoldering/soldering chips, flashing through JTAG etc. How is pulling out the SD card and reimaging it akin to "bricking"?
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
As I posted previously:
I own a Odroid C1+ I intended to use as a mini network television appliance - basically a home-brew Tablo. I had convinced myself that since it ran a recent-looking version of Ubuntu, and that version supported my USB tuner stick, I was good to go.
In fact, the OS for the C1+ is a weird hybrid of a very old kernel (3.10 IIRC) and somewhat newer, but still oldish, user-space code. For those new to this, the current kernel is 4.4.4, and 3.10 was released in June 2013. This kernel dates from before the gigantic LinuxTV merge in 3.16, which means that practically no video of any sort works out of the box. You can install things like VLC and/or Kodi and get video that way, but almost all devices - cameras, tuners, etc. - will not work out of the box. In contrast, almost all of these will work out of the box on the RPi.
A much larger issue is the lack of hardware compression/decompression. The Mali 450 is a powerful GPU, much faster than the one in the RPi, but lacks any API for this sort of codec support. The AmLogic CPU does include a "VPU" system, basically a SIMD unit, but the API is proprietary. I am aware of only one program that uses it, Kodi, where it is supported by code in the Kodi stack itself. This code is not available to other programs, like ffmpeg or gstreamer. In contrast, the RPi has widespread codec support, although you have to buy the 264 license key.
So, if you are doing anything video-like other than bare Kodi, the C1+ is *not a good product*. Your hardware probably won't work, and if you get lucky and it does, the performance will be very poor. On my C1+, x264 compresses at ~10 FPS, while an RPi, ostensibly much slower, manages about 25.
I worked on the videocore, I wrote firmware for it several years back.
It is a shame Broadcom does not open source their videocore compiler. The videocore is a very neat chip, quite capable SIMD instruction set. There could be many more codecs and drivers for it.
In contrast, the RPi has widespread codec support, although you have to buy the 264 license key.
A license key is not needed for 264. You must be thinking of MPEG2.
Considering the power of the hardware I don't see much of a bottle neck with the Pi.
I can get over 20 MB/sec to a USB3 GoFlex on a Pogoplug Series 4... near its locally-connected speed. That's got just one core at an even lower clock rate.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Framing someone is something that can already be done in JavaScript with every major web browser on every major OS.