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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.
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.
It looked like "News for nerds, stuff that matters." to me, anyway. How's your Broadcom stock doing today?
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?
It's not a multiuser system, and it's highly unlikely someone could damage it remotely. Even if it happened, there's nothing of much importance in it (it's mostly a secondary dns, mx, and xmpp server). Userland libs and services are kept up-to-date and restarted as needed, though.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
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.
I'm a troll for bashing the company who made the computer I choose to use every day?
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.
So when are any of these SBC makers going to set up an educational foundation, and start supporting their stuff for use by educators and students in the 8-17 age bracket?
They're just tapping into the market of 18-60 year olds who buy shitty SBCs for embedded home projects? Raspberry Pi doesn't have anything to worry about. In fact, they can better focus on their project goals if crap-board vendors tap off and remove that secondary customer group from their product.
Most of these cheap SBC makers actually corrupt the goals of the Raspberry Pi creators. They take away the open Digital I/O pins, which is half of the equation with the RPi. That's fine for all of the abstractionists who wouldn't know what to do with bare hardware in the first place, and are probably even frightened because bare hardware is scary and unsafe.
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
It's not off-topic at all, the main debate about C2 vs Pi3 is about price vs hardware. And it's not trolling if it's true. The entry-level Mac mini, given the hardware specifications, should cost at least 40% less.
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.
I've seen people online asking questions and trying to get windows to run on some of these other Raspberry Pi wannabes. It's hysterical.
I've yet to do it. I use sudo for a lot of stuff but never tried being root.
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.
WinCE could do it but unless you are planning to only run a single application it's a pain. I've got a handy little WinCE box that runs as an X terminal (how weird is that) and it works well. I've got an ebook reader running WinCE that does not work well since it's a situation where multi-tasking would be nice (yes I know WinCE has been shown to multi-task in rigged toy demos but it doesn't get used in the wild) and it's sloooow handing over from the launcher application to the ereader functions.
There are newer things descended from WinCE but they need a bit more resources.
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 got one of the Cubieboard SBCs.
Winner of the "Most Hilarious Chinglish Website" award. Utterly indecipherable. Try to find product details, it leads to a 3rd party review at Nerdbench.
sudo lets you run a command as root (uid=0). So yes, you've used root plenty of times.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.'"