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.

Comments

Re:Not a fan of Odroid

[Andy Dodd]

Not sure why you got marked as flamebait here.

For Insignal and Hardkernel's Exynos-based Android projects, their poor software support (vastly outdated software baselines - no excuse for development reference boards to have older software than carrier-approved Android handset releases for the same SoC, software baselines which were vasty different from any shipped product containing SoC, and Hardkernel's distribution of their Android source as a 2GB megatarball with no commit history - I hear they might have finally fixed this but back in 2012 their source was a 2.2GB megatarball) was the reason that nearly all maintainers of AOSP-derivative projects (such as CyanogenMod) for Samsung Exynos-based hardware decided to stop working with Samsung devices in late 2012. They were, simply, a bugridden nightmare.