Odroid C2 Challenges Raspberry Pi 3 On Hardware But Not Ecosystem (hackaday.com) 78
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.
Re: Slashvertisement again ? (Score:1)
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> 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.
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iTunes used to be a shining example of perfect software (on OS X anyway) until they decided to add everything but the kitchen sink.
And no, Macs don't use the same hardware as PCs. Macs use the same hardware as old PCs. See the entry model of the latest Mac mini for a shining example of crap hardware at Apple prices.
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The $450 model, you mean?
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You mean the $499 U.S. model which is $599 in Canada?
The current exchange rate tells me Apple will increase their prices again, probably at their next keynote. Get ready for the crappy Mac mini, now starting at 675 dollars!
Yikes.
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It looked like "News for nerds, stuff that matters." to me, anyway. How's your Broadcom stock doing today?
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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 c
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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.
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There are
It's the same as PC vs Mac (Score:1)
The PC has superior hardware at a higher cost and... eh... oh wait.
Never mind.
(posted from Macmini4,1)
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I'm a troll for bashing the company who made the computer I choose to use every day?
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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.
faster booting (Score: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. :)
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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.
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I've yet to do it. I use sudo for a lot of stuff but never tried being root.
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sudo lets you run a command as root (uid=0). So yes, you've used root plenty of times.
Not a fan of Odroid (Score:5, Insightful)
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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 hav
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Even disregarding the community aspect, Odroid runs a weirdo/old software stack.
Ubuntu 16.04 is "weirdo/old"?
The reason I'd avoid it is because I' m trying to use one of their XU4s to run a GigE camera, and under Ubuntu 15.4 it appears to have issues handling jumbo frames. That's a bit better than what happens using the official Hardkernel Ubuntu 15.10 -- the GigE controller (connected through the USB, as is done on the Pi) disconnects about ten seconds after being initialized. I.e., it simply disappears. And I can't get an answer from Hardkernel about any fixes they plan for this.
I
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The problem is not the customization. it's the lack of support. Basically th
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Even disregarding the community aspect, Odroid runs a weirdo/old software stack.
Ubuntu 16.04 is "weirdo/old"?
You are talking about the top of the software stack. He was talking about the bottom of the software stack - the firmware/binary blobs and the non-mainstream kernel drivers that you need to run on the odroid.
The reason I'd avoid it is because I' m trying to use one of their XU4s to run a GigE camera, and under Ubuntu 15.4 it appears to have issues handling jumbo frames ...
Like he said - "weird/old software stack". It sounds like Hardkernel are doing hacks in the kernel source to get things partly working, but contributing them back to the mainline kernel (which is where QA happens in the linux world).
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Swaps out Wifi or ethernet (which PI 3 ALSO has) (Score:1)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
c2 vs pi3 (Score:3)
Actual link to the Odroid C2 vs Raspberri Pi 3 comparison:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p... [phoronix.com]
If you ignore the thing RPi hardware is best at... (Score:1)
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
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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.
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I think they both have their own audience. At this price point you'll never make everyone happy with one board.
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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 hone
Fitness for use is up to each application.
Software support
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The second plug in a week (Score:2)
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A company that's little known but produces massively better hardware than hyped RasPi does deserve some spotlight. As for support for bad hardware, you can return it for a limited time after purchase -- but really, both for RasPi and hardkernel the hardware's cost is low enough compared to shipping costs that it's less hassle to just throw away and buy new. We're not talking about $5000 or more servers here.
Higher Specs look good on Paper (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
community (Score:2)
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 enclosu
Isn't this the 2nd news about Odroid C2 RPi3? (Score:2)
Oh yes, yes it is : https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
Calling odrioid software immature is an understate (Score:1)
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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"?
Be warned - hardware support is limited, video bad (Score:2)
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 f