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$50 Odroid-C4 Raspberry Pi 4 Competitor Combines Amlogic S905X3 SoC with 4GB RAM
- chomp 6y agoBut does it run a mainline Linux kernel? I hate how a lot of Hardkernel’s stuff needs custom patches.
- robert_foss 6y agoI don't think the RPi runs an entirely mainline kernel either.
- gjsman-1000 6y agoIt doesn't AFAIK, but it's getting there. https://github.com/lategoodbye/rpi-zero/issues/43 https://github.com/lategoodbye/rpi-zero/issues/43
- mgulick 6y agoMy Odroid-C2 runs a mainline kernel. I use it headless, so I'm not sure about graphics support, but its been otherwise extremely stable. It did take a year or two after release to get full upstream support. I'd imagine this new board will follow a similar trajectory.
- cnxsoft 6y agoMaybe not right now, but Baylibre is working on this: https://twitter.com/Superna9999/status/1253307218688081920 https://twitter.com/Superna9999/status/1253307218688081920
- ac29 6y agoThe answer appears to be yes, with some exceptions like the integrated video encoder: http://linux-meson.com/doku.php http://linux-meson.com/doku.php But, I dont have one to test - it certainly might ship with a weird hacked up bootloader or something. I do have a board based on an earlier generation Amlogic SoC that I'm quite happy with. Worked well out of the box and has continued to do so.
- simon1573 6y agoHow well would this hold up as an HTPC? Any reasons to avoid it?
- adrianN 6y agoA Raspberry Pi 3 is more than sufficient as a HTPC in my experience.
- anfractuosity 6y agoHave you managed to get streaming services like netflix working without stuttering per chance? When I tried via a web browser a while ago I couldn't get it to work well, iirc I had to install a plugin from somewhere too.
- zihotki 6y agoIf you want to stream high-quality content neither this one, nor it's older brother N2 are not suitable due to DRM and other issues. You'd end-up spending to much time to troubleshoot all problems. Edit: I own Odroid N2, spent several weeks trying to make it working well. At the end I've given up and got an Intel NUC device.
- BubRoss 6y agoI don't know what that person is doing with a pi 3, but my experience is that retro pi works well but modern video or web browsing is not going to hold up.
- swebs 6y agoThe Pi 3 doesn't have HEVC hardware decoding, but the 4 does.
- squarefoot 6y agoIt's still a pain in the ass watching a 720p youtube video on Raspbian+RPi 4 from Firefox. It's barely fluid when windowed while stutters as hell in fullscren with the CPU constantly overheating, and 1080p is much worse. Under Kodi it's way different, of course, still I wonder why one can't have video acceleration on the desktop.
- sgt 6y agoIt's perhaps a bit dishonest to show a "UHD 4K video" being displayed in Firefox and YouTube when there's no confirmation at all what kind of video mode the player is running. It's probably 1080p or maybe 720p.
- zihotki 6y agoSo according to 7zip and unixbench benchmarks RPI 4 with out of order CPU on 1,5GHz is on par with Odroid C4 with in order CPU on 2GHz. And the price you'll pay to get one will be closer to 70$ in EU including shipment costs or reseller fees.
- tssva 6y agoAnd a RPI 4 can be reliably overclocked to 2GHz.
- DeathArrow 6y agoFor $30 I can get an used H61 board, i3-2100 and 4GB DDR3 RAM. That is going to be much faster than both Raspberry and Odroid. The ARM boards make sense only if you have power and size restrictions.
- the1pato 6y agoWhere?
- DeathArrow 6y agoOn local classified ads website.
- Koshkin 6y agoThese boards have a different form factor.
- syntheticnature 6y agoOr if you need known-new boards, especially in quantity, though RPi has its own availability limitations for commercial use IIRC. Power and Size restriction can be a bigger deal than you've made it sound, though. I can fit ten Pis in a carry-on without concern if needed, and I have needed to do so in the past. For noise reduction, fanless is better than muffling a fan, though one does need to make sure the heat sink is big enough.
- snvzz 6y ago
- sebdei 6y agoAnybody familiar with emulation on the Amlogic? I'm looking for a good SBC for months now for HTPC & Emulation and was shortly before ordering a VIM3. However, I read somewhere that Amlogic processors are not good for GPU tasks like emulation due to unsupported drivers. Therefor, I looked at other Board like the Rockpi N10. What you guys think?
- karatestomp 6y ago1) x86 is pretty much always easier and better for (I assume, as you mentioned HTPC, that you mean) game console emulation than other architectures, so if you don't have to have an SBC get a cheap, small x86 machine. Consider used small-footprint business workstations. 2) Raspberry Pi has much better official and (especially) community software support than other SBCs. Things like bluetooth or wifi are usually supported better there, with fewer quirks and breakage, and software's usually more up to date generally. You're rolling the dice with anything else if you're looking for something you won't have to spend a bunch of time fiddling with or fixing all the time.
- sebdei 6y agoThanks for the reply. I initially didn't want x86 due to the footprint you already mentioned. I'm a fan of ARM processors so I prefer those. I also read somewhere that RK3399 for emulation should also be a good choice, therefore I considered the Rockpi 10N as well.
- snvzz 6y ago2) Raspberry Pi has much better official and (especially) community software support than other SBCs. I disagree, as my experience has been the opposite of this. RPis are always a quirky mess, where doing anything but using turnkey appliance-like solutions is painful, and even these turnkey solutions suffer from poor quality. It's a low-effort, low-quality ecosystem, and my experience has been better with each and every one of the alternatives I've used.
- detaro 6y ago
- BubRoss 6y agoThis has an A55, which I don't think is competitive with the raspberry pi 4 A72. The pi 4 was a huge breakthrough because it has a multi core out of order cpu and starts at $35. Something that people would buy over the pi 4 will have to be a later generation A7X cpu without being more than double the price. The better the CPU, the closer it comes to a lightweight desktop replacement, child computer, TV computer, router replacement etc. The pi 4 is already getting into that territory.
- Legogris 6y agoApart from that, I really think there's a gap on the market in terms of RAM. Only since recently are there a select few SBCs with 4GB RAM, anything higher than that and you're in the 200~250$+price-range with significantly higher footprint in terms of size and power consumption. It might be my personal ignorance, but I just don't see why you couldn't take any of the more recent SoCs and throw at least 8GB on there? Do some of these SoC vendors limit the address space or something..? Right now this model is a nuanced alternative to the Rpi4B; a model with more RAM would be a new segment in the market unlocking new possibilities.
- rjsw 6y agoSome vendors do seem to limit their address space, there have been suggestions that they just pasted an AArch64 CPU into one of their existing ARM SoC designs.
- snvzz 6y ago>which I don't think is competitive with the raspberry pi 4 A72. The power efficiency is certainly competitive. Very competitive. Raspberry Pi has a lot of justifying to do, regarding its much elevated power consumption, as the benchmarks do elucidate it actually doesn't have the performance to show fort it.
- BubRoss 6y agoYou are going to have to link a source for that. The A55 is claimed to be 15% more power efficient than the A53 while the A72 is 3-4 times as fast.
- ijager 6y agoJust like the RPi, no plated mounting holes for grounding. I am curious if there is a valid reason not to use grounded mounting holes. It is not easy to pass EMC tests if you want to embed these boards into some device without proper grounding.
- squarefoot 6y agoIs it possible that they might be relying on mounting frames for metal enclosures or wired grounding near the power supply connector, just to avoid ground loops?
- ijager 6y agoAh I guess. So you would design a custom frame that connects electrically to the connector housing(s). Might be a good accessory to sell.
- mgulick 6y agoHaving eMMC support is a game changer over a microSD card. It makes it feel like a real computer.
- rjsw 6y agoThe ODROID-C2 has eMMC, doesn't feel as fast as the eMMC drive on another AArch64 machine that I have though.
- mgulick 6y agoMaybe, I don't have another eMMC board to test with, but compared to my RPi 3 with an SD card, the eMMC feels way faster. Very noticeable doing an apt upgrade. Note I use all of my boards headless.
- zozbot234 6y agoA microSD card is just MMC that's socketed instead of being soldered to the package/board. It's good for flexibility. With 4GB RAM, performance should be a non-issue either way.
- myself248 6y ago....over a narrow bus, and with controllers that have to make assumptions about power being yanked at any moment so they can't do proper SSD-like things that eMMC chips can do.
- vardump 6y agoNarrow bus? I think current SD card standards can go way past 1GB per second (note: see edit below). It's an implementation detail. In practice, these cheap boards will have a cheap eMMC soldered in that can't do these fancy things anyways. It's not going to be same quality chip like in flagship phones. Once that cheap eMMC fails, the device is bricked. Edit: SD card standards still can't go past 1 GB/s, max 985 MB/s. Either way, plenty for cheap SBCs.
- Legogris 6y agoThis looks like a compelling alternative to Rpi4B, and I'm happy they went without WiFi/BT. I really wish we saw more boards like this with PoE support, though - if nothing else as an optional hat to the board.
- woodrowbarlow 6y agoraspberry foundation has a first-party PoE hat: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/poe-hat/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/poe-hat/
- Legogris 6y agoYup, and so does Rock Pi (I think they're even cross-compatible). Unfortunately the official Raspberry hat maxes out at 2.5A, which starts being problematic if you add a single power-hungry peripheral, like an external USB disk. I've even gotten warnings on insufficient power in dmesg with zero peripherals attached on a 4B+. So far I had no issues with DSLRKIT's third-party hats, though!
- ExtremisAndy 6y agoWhy are you happy about no wifi/Bt? Genuinely curious.
- Legogris 6y agoBecause I have zero use for it. Components add cost and footprint. I am uncertain on if the power consumption goes up from these modules being there idling when modules/drivers are not loaded, but that could be a factor. And the less black-box non-open components on my board, the better.
- hajile 6y agoI'd wager that the addition of an additional wifi-free spec would actually increase costs. With the need for active cooling to prevent throttling, the pi4 veers much closer to an ultra-small desktop replacement and for that, the integrated wifi is better.
- heyflyguy 6y agoSomeone need to build a marketplace where you can rent these new little boards that come out. I'm probably buying one every quarter, play with it for a day or two and throw it on the pile. good fun though
- Moru 6y agoYou can always set up pi-hole on one of the older ones and give away to friends.
- Yetanfou 6y agoThere is a marketplace where you can sell those boards which more or less serves the same purpose, probably at a lower price point.
- syntheticnature 6y agoIf we're talking something other than eBay, I'm curious where the marketplace is.
- Yetanfou 6y agoNot specifically eBay, I meant all sorts of second-hand selling methods, from Craigslist through eBay and similar sites. Nothing special, really, just the normal way of getting rid of stuff which just ends up taking up space otherwise.
- syntheticnature 6y agoHere I was thinking Swappa for SBCs, not sure the market's big enough though.
- eeZah7Ux 6y agoA rental/lease model could also encourage collection and proper recycling of old hardware.
- dmm 6y agoDoes ffmpeg have access to the video decode acceleration on these boards? Or is it an external binary that, for example, Kodi is using to decode?
- vardump 6y agoI hope next Raspberry Pi will finally upgrade to 64-bit memory bus. 32-bits is just too narrow. If the price is an issue, lowest $35 tier could still be 32-bit.
- myself248 6y agoThank goodness it's a regular HDMI connector. The mini and micro connectors used on certain Pis add $5 to the cost the moment you want to actually use a display.
- Legogris 6y agoMore like a bimonthly 5$ for every time the connector breaks, unless you leave it in place and never touch it. micro-HDMI connectors are ridiculously brittle. (Had those interfaces on two laptops and I sighed deeply when I saw that the RPi 4 had them as well)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mosselman 6y agoThis is very interesting to me: H.265/H.264 60fps encoder I could use this to re-encode my video collection without having to have my main pc running for days/weeks.
- Dork1234 6y agoThe problem is you will want them encoded in H.265 to reduce file size and increase quality.
- gjsman-1000 6y agoNVIDIA Graphics cards, even my lowly GTX 1050, have an encoder called NVENC. I don't use it though with my DVD rips though. When I tried using NVENC, it was a bit faster than CPU, but the resulting file size was significantly larger to get a similar quality level. Basically, NVENC was faster, but significantly less efficient than CPU encoding is. Because of that, any hardware encoder needs to be tested thoroughly before you start encoding on it. It could be awesome, or you might not care about the larger filesizes than CPU, but you need to do your research. However, at $50, what do you have to lose? I'm just saying the odds of this board's ARM CPU being better than NVIDIA's not-great encoder is slim. The only other thing I'd point out is that Graphics Drivers for ARM are a very, very mixed bag. Just because it supports H.265/H.264 encode does not mean the software support is there. I remember a few years ago when the first Chinese Pi clones started coming to market. They bragged about how the hardware supported H.264 4K Decode - but didn't mention that the drivers to support hardware acceleration of even basic GUI functions weren't there. Again, do your research, but $50 is probably a good experiment.
- DeathArrow 6y agoIntel CPUs have QuickSync (hardware encoder and decoder) since Sandy Bridge. Using that is faster than using actual CPU cores.
- gjsman-1000 6y agoI don't dispute the faster part, but I do dispute the end result. The end result, in my experience, is always a larger file size for similar quality than even a CPU set to High speed in Handbrake.
- quezzle 6y agoThe software lets down all raspberry pi alikes.
- Legogris 6y agoCould you elaborate? I've tried boards from a couple of different vendors and if anything, the proprietary stuff needed for Raspberry Pi has been the most frustrating for me (apart from Android TV Boxes, but hey, we weren't "supposed" to run Linux on those in the first place). The 3B and 4B have their own different hacks needed to get normal Linux distros running under 64bit, and it's nothing you can expect an average hobbyist user to figure out even with the resources put out by people in the community who have succeeded (unless they just flash some unsigned image containing god knows what uploaded out by some rando on a forum).
- quezzle 6y agoDon’t know what you mean by havks to run Linux. Rpi has excellent Linux. You’ll just find tons of things that don’t work when you use anything but rpi.
- raphlinus 6y agoDoes anyone know if these things support Vulkan? I know on the RPi4 it's being worked on but will probably take a while. [1]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/vulkan-raspberry-pi-first-triangle/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/vulkan-raspberry-pi-first-t...
- DeathArrow 6y agoAccording to this [0] and this [1] it should. [0] https://developer.arm.com/ip-products/graphics-and-multimedia/mali-gpus/mali-g31-gpu https://developer.arm.com/ip-products/graphics-and-multimedi... [1] https://developer.arm.com/solutions/graphics-and-gaming/apis/vulkan/vulkan-drivers https://developer.arm.com/solutions/graphics-and-gaming/apis...
- gjsman-1000 6y agoRight now, software support is very, very sparse and tech companies aren't interested. Only the RPF is paying for it on Linux. Google 'armbian vulkan.' armbian is an OS that these Pi clones often run.
- DeathArrow 6y agoStill no cheap ARM board with SATA3 support. Still no ARM board with a decently powerful CPU, SATA3, NVME, PCI-E x16, USB3.2, and DDR4 slots. It looks like ARM boards are pretty much the same, unless you want them for a pretty niche application. Also, software support is not quite the best.
- gjsman-1000 6y agoImagine if someone made a Snapdragon 865 SBC... Or if Apple made an A13 SBC. They'd make a killing.
- goda90 6y agoYou could always buy a $1000+ Snapdragon development kit. https://shop.intrinsyc.com/products/snapdragon-865-mobile-hardware-development-kit https://shop.intrinsyc.com/products/snapdragon-865-mobile-ha...
- nine_k 6y agoWhat would make such a board particularly cheap? The CPU would be cheaper than x86 but not dirt-cheap. It should be reasonably fast to make sense for sata3 or nvme. This implies fast RAM, too. If anything, the economy of scale won't be in favor of this board either, unless it's produced in millions.
- DeathArrow 6y agoWhy should it be fast to have SATA 3 support? They just have to integrate a SATA controller. NAS boxes have pretty weak CPUs and I thought these cheap ARM boards could be used in NAS if there was actual SATA 3 support.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoYou mean like here? https://linux-sunxi.org/SATA https://linux-sunxi.org/SATA Just because it is implemented to tick a check box doesn't mean it is implemented in a good way...
- snvzz 6y agoThe highlights: 720mA on load, eMMC support and not being based on a broadcom SoC. I am tempted to get one. The raspberry pi was that way regarding power consumption in the beginning, but it uses way too much power these days. It also has an infamously slow and unreliable sdcard interface.
- agumonkey 6y agoForgot the rpi4 consumption. (1000-1200mA on load) https://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/power-consumption https://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/power-consumption
- megous 6y agoGood thing is that it doesn't use 5V input directly, and you can connect it to higher voltage power supply, and don't need to worry that much about cabling and power supply quality.
- hajile 6y agoLies, Dang Lies, Statistics, and not questioning data from the company selling the board. A55 is a 2-wide decode in-order architecture with 2 execution ports and 2.65 DMIPS. A72 is a 3-wide decode out-of-order architecture with 8 execution ports and 4.72 DMIPS. Obviously something is wrong here, so let's examine what it could be. To get it out of the way, Mali G31 MP1 is theoretically slightly less performance (20.8GFLOPS vs 24GFLOPS), but my money would be on the Mali being much more efficient (the VideoCore architecture has been notoriously slower than it's theoretical numbers would indicate). Cache is another consideration. The Pi 4 uses 1mb of L2. I can't find anything about the 905 except that it has L3 cache. The maximum L2 for A55 is 256kb. L3 can go up to 4MB. The s922x launched middle of last year and seems to have had 1mb of cache on it's A73 cores, so I would guess at less than that for a lower-end chip. In any case, I'd put cache as equal at best. Pi 4 uses 1-4gb LPDDR4-3200 vs some DDR4-1320 on the odroid. No matter how you slice it though, something weird is going on here. There is a default clockspeed difference (1.5GHz vs 2.0GHz), but it isn't nearly as large as the actual performance per clock difference. Since the 905 is apparently rated to run at 1.9GHz, I suspect they slightly overclocked the chips in their devices. I'd note that overclocking the Pi 4 to 2.0GHz is easily doable, but I wouldn't expect them to do that as it can lower the life expectancy of the chip (given the 8-stage A55 pipeline, I doubt that the 905 has much overclocking overhead). On paper, the Pi 4 should be way faster at most of these things, so it must be elsewhere. The first stop is data storage. SD cards suck. They suck so much that a spinning drive can usually get better performance. They desperately need to launch a new Pi with a SATA port or PCIe port for a faster drive. eMMC is a much better default option. The Pi loading benchmarks get 2-4x faster (sometimes more) when a USB3 SSD is used. On the flip side though, if a benchmark sits in RAM, you aren't going to notice a difference unless their benches are including load time. That may be fine for a few things, but it should be stated and it simply doesn't apply to a lot of real-world uses (for example, loading a browser may be a little slower, but opening and using web pages will not). The next question is thermals. The 28nm Pi with larger cores definitely gets hotter and throttles more than the 12nm smaller A55 cores. If they shoved the pi into the default enclosure without a heatsink, it would definitely throttle hard which would affect benchmarks significantly. I fully expect this to be responsible for a large percentage of the performance disparity over what would be expected. Testing the raw Pi would be much more fair. A small heatsink would be more than fair and a fan would be overly-generous (seriously, pi foundation needs to recommend and sell a heatsink and redo their case design to accommodate a fan). I'd love for this to also be disclosed. The next issue is insidious and veers much closer to evil. Using the same OS when possible should be a prerequisite for fair comparisons. Ubuntu team did some great work and fixed the major bugs that were hurting 64-bit usage (USB issues and 2-3GB RAM limit). I switched from Rasbian and there was a very noticeable increase in performance. Those fixes have been available for almost 6 months and there's no reason not to use it for their testing other than cooking the benches. We aren't talking small amounts either. 10% faster memory, 50% higher dhrystone, 15% faster audio encoding, 2x faster network performance, etc. I'm almost positive that they used Rasbian instead. https://medium.com/@matteocroce/why-you-should-run-a-64-bit-os-on-your-raspberry-pi4-bd5290d48947 https://medium.com/@matteocroce/why-you-should-run-a-64-bit-... No matter how you slice it though, they legit won the encryption benchmark by a landslide. Broadcom didn't include the armv8 crypto extensions. It was a dumb decision and one more thing that needs to be fixed on the next generation pi.
- acd 6y agoI think Odroid c4 will have a gpu advantage an area where traditionally Raspberry Pi has been weak. It takes time and tweaking to get ok graphics out of the pi. So Odroid may make for a better HTPC setup.