ODROID-C2 Compared to Raspberry Pi 3 and Orange Pi Plus

It would also be interesting to know how eMMC compares to the SATA interface that used to be available on old Allwinner SoCs before they canned it.

I bought a CubieTruck (Allwinner A20) and a SATA SSD drive simply because it seemed to be the only cheap ARM board with decent I/O performance.

Oh, the use of small footprint, low-power hardware is completely intentional in this case. :-)

I used to have a band amp rack w/ 5 infiniband connected machines for testing existing distributed systems. Then I decided that they're all doing it wrong.

Having five Xeon servers on your desk is not much fun when it comes to noise, but if you have some sort of server area yeah I agree you can get some good deals.

I just wanted to day thank you for posting this! I had no idea.

Can you plug them into a wall socket or do you need electrified rails?

Great info, thanks!

I had the N3700 version of that board, and as a base for building a Windows 10 machine, it was very nice for the price. But Linux support for the onboard video was terrible, so I ultimately gave it to a friend who needed a Win10 media center PC. Once Intel starts officially supporting the Braswell/CherryView GPU in Linux (and it might by now; I got rid of it before the 4.4 kernel was released which supposedly supported it), it will make for an excellent, quiet Linux workstation or special purpose board.

Mainly what I want to do is use ARM64 and abandon Intel, so I don't look at options like that.

It's pretty clear that the x86 ISA has retarded the state of the art in computing for the past couple decades. The byzantine encodings make it mathematically impossible to write an optimal compiler for today's x86 instruction set.

http://www.emulators.com/docs/nx05_vx64.htm

http://www.emulators.com/docs/nx06_rmw.htm

Of course, compiler writers still chase after greater performance, which leads to optimizations of questionable value (and demonstrable harm).

http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1307

Throw away all that cruft, use a clean instruction set, and compilers can go back to being small and fast, easily generating output that is also small and fast.

Kind of pathetic of them to use the Transmission icon¹ without attribution or permission in their marketing² materials³ though.

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¹ — https://www.transmissionbt.com/

² — http://www.asrock.com/mb/sticker/9-Power%20Gear(L).png

³ — http://www.asrock.com/mb/sticker/PowerGear-2.jpg

There are a lot of differences between Odroid/Dragonboard and the AMD A1100-based Cello. The former boards are essentially Android phone/tablet chips with the minimal amount of support circuitry to put them on a development board, and the result is of course very cheap, owing to the sheer volume of Android chips being sold.

However boards like the AMD Cello, the Gigabyte MP30-AR0, the Huskyboard, have server chips in them, external DIMMs (the Gigabyte takes up to 128GB of RAM), real SATA, PCIe slots, multiple ethernet (Gigabyte has 5 x ethernet, 2 running at 10Gbps), IPMI and so on. They also conform to the SBSA/SBBR standard so you can boot RHEL and (in the near future) Windows on them.

The cost of this is significant - a fully equipped AMD Cello (with case, RAM, SDD, etc) is going to be US$600. A fully equipped Gigabyte w/32 GB of RAM and an SDD will set you back US$1000+, but you're getting a real server for that money.

More about the Gigabyte board on my blog: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/?s=mp30

The one that stands out is the OpenCV library that never materialized. Another was video drivers. Best approach is to be your own judge and go look at their support forum.

I would love to hear more about this. I've been considering a similar use case for a while and haven't found anything really comparable to what is available commercially.

Be aware: some of the ARM boards with SATA have it as a USB to SATA adapter.

Or just buy an old laptop. I recently bought a Dell E6230 (3rd Gen Core i3) from eBay for $90. Fully functional laptop including RAM, hard drive, keyboard and LCD.

People often forget that the used laptop market exists. I use a Dell E6220 now as my main laptop because it accepts 16GB DDR3 and lasts 6+ hours on a 6 cell battery.

Sure, I would love to have a laptop with an HD or 4K screen, but for $100-200 I can buy the next previous generation each year and use the old one as a server for projects.

They consume ~7W idle with the LCD on. I'm sure that would drop to 3-4W with the screen off.

I used to have a MacBook (2011), but the thought of paying $1500-2000 for a new laptop where I can't even upgrade the memory, WiFi, or storage (easily) strikes me as insane.

It also has no audio/video output, no ethernet and no SD card.

$159 isn't exactly a similar price point, and it's not designed to be used as a headless server, like a simple NAS. And how would you use any GPIO for sensors?

There are tablets on Banggood that costs about half of what the Compute stick costs, and that's with a battery and a touch display.

I've got a Pi Zero, Pi B+, Pi 2, and Pi 3, and the Pi 3 is the only one that has virtually zero lag on the "selection screen" for Kodi and OpenElec. The Pi 2's lag is barely noticeable, but the BCM2835 in the B+ and Zero does lag significantly (though playback is flawless on all of them).

That said, none of the Pis come close to a commercial set top box like the Roku 3 or Nvidia Shield TV, both of which are 60fps and buttery smooth.

The Turris Omnia looks amazing! It's got everything I'd want in a home router. Do you know why it's due to be discontinued?

Yeah, it's telling that true (some have only 2 controllers, and there's probably single controller ones too) quad port NICs usually go for $70+ used, and in the hundreds for a new one. On the bright side those usually have support for some more advanced stuff like TOE.