Odroid-C4
hardkernel.com
hardkernel.com
Until I am sure that software support for these other boards is good, I will forever stick to raspi.
If I remember correctly, the binary blobs for the graphics driver (Mali) were also hard to get for newer kernel versions.
When you buy an ARM Odroid device, you're tied to Hardkernel's vendor-specific patches and vendor-specific Linux kernel branches. As you would expect, the quality of these patches varies from bad to absolutely terrible. If you visit the Hardkernel forums, you'll see people casually swapping patches to get functionality like USB to "work".
The practice of not even trying to merge with mainline is completely unacceptable, and not only leads to fragmentation but erodes any quality guarantees one can make about systems one builds on top of their products. They're literally running code that the mainstream Linux kernel development community has neither vetoed nor reviewed. It's for that very reason that I will not support them anymore. The ARM Linux ecosystem is bad enough without me subsidizing this sort of behavior.
It's also disappointing to see the Linux kernel community not coming down hard on such endeavors (Linus in particular could enforce the Linux trademark) since they dilute the entire ecosystem and erode quality. Odroid advertises Linux but it's not really running Linux.
G
(edit: reminds me of fiddling with custom ACPI tables because of crappy BIOS on PCs)
Please remind me why I'd ever go for this one?
If the power consumption matters, then ODROID-C4 is better. If the performance of the non-volatile memory is a limitation, then ODROID-C4 is much faster. If the speed of DRAM is a limitation, then ODROID-C4 is faster. If the application requires sustained performance with all cores active, then ODROID-C4 is faster, unless a custom cooler is used with RPI 4, which must be either very noisy or very large (larger than the board).
After you add all the required accessories, the prices fror RPI 4 and for ODROID-C4 are very similar, for both of them you would reach around $100 for a decent system, but the ODROID shop is somewhat more convenient because you can buy from a single place almost any accessory you might need besides the basic board.
But looking at these charts I see they omitted devices on some tests, especially toward the bottom. And herein lies the case study for the rest of us.
As a skeptical consumer of infographics, I smell a rat when the charts don’t line up. And it doesn’t matter if they still win on those benchmarks, what matters is the omission, which looks like you’re trying to hide something. Since I don’t work with these people, and can’t just go ask what happened, the safe bet is to assume the worst.
Publish data for all competitors on all benchmarks or people will assume you are lying.
That said, they avoided the most common sin: in all charts where magnitude matters, they use a zero origin for the charts, so there is no distortion of relative value between options. They only chopped for graphs where steady state is the point (like thermals and frequency).
Also build quality is a bit suspect, we've each had one or two of these things die on us.
Ended up replacing it with an Nvidia Shield.
On the upside, they're cheap and the metal case you can get for them is pretty cool. They don't run too hot and they're reasonably fast. For a while they were the only option with USB3
the other problem is if I need more Processing power I just move to an x86 platform... if I can't run it on a low power board.
ODROID-C4, as delivered, with only a small passive heatsink, can run indefinitely with all cores at 2 GHz, without overheating.
Therefore a Raspberry Pi 4 without improved cooling will be in many cases slower, due to throttling, despite the larger Cortex-A72 cores.
Moreover, Cortex-A72 implements an obsolete instruction set, while Cortex-A55 implements the ARMv8.2-A instruction set, which for certain applications, e.g. for the synchronization of multiple threads (i.e. for atomic instructions), has significant improvements.
I made a huge research trying to find cheap and powerful board for my prototypes. And RPI always wins in the price. Even Chinese clones are more expensive.
Why? It turns out RPI is a non profit.
- wifi
- bluetooth
- 1 HDMI port (pi4 has 2 ports, this has 1)- hardware 1080p60 h264 encoding (the RPi4 is limited to 1080p30 encode)
- I know the C4 supports VP9 decoding at 4K60, but I'm not sure that the RPi4 does?
- Cortex A55 over an A72; in general usage you're likely to see the A72 beat out by the A55, though it's going to be close enough that you may not care
I can see using one of these, for example, to build a much cheaper homebrew NewTek Spark[0], assuming I can get its hardware encode to play nicely. (It doesn't compete with the Spark Plus, which does 4K60, but for my purposes, 1080p60 is sufficient.)
[0] - https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1348898-REG/newtek_fg...
For example 4 GB DRAM are soldered, so they are included in the $50, but the eMMC flash memory is on a socket, so you can choose any size between 8 GB and 128 GB, depending on how much you want to pay, or you may choose no eMMC and use just a microSD card.
WiFi and Bluetooth are available as very cheap USB devices. I actually prefer that ODROID-C4 includes a 4-port USB 3.0 hub, which RPI 4 lacks, instead of including WiFi in the base configuration, because I always need as many fast USB ports as possible, but I do not always need WiFi.
For about $100, you can buy an ODROID-C4 with 4 GB DRAM, 64 GB eMMC, case, power supply and adapters for writing the eMMC on another computer and for the serial console.
For a similar configuration with RPI 4, you must pay $55 for the 4 GB variant and then you must buy a 64 GB microSD card, which will be much slower than the ODROID eMMC and you must also buy a case and a PSU. The total price will probably be similar, but the performance will be significantly lower for many applications, due to slower DRAM, slower non-volatile memory and bad cooling on RPI 4.
The C4 is based on the Cortex A55 (A5x models are typically the low-performance/power Cortex models), while the Pi 4 is based on the Cortex A72 (A7x are the high-performance/power ones).
For benchmarks that depend only on the CPU, using an improved cooler on RPI4 would increase the sustained performance above Cortex-A55, except for some custom programs that could be written to take advantage of the newer extra instructions available on Cortex-A55.
A quadruple smartphone core like the obsolete Cortex-A72 or any of its successors, Cortex-A75, Cortex-A76 and Cortex-A77, requires a smartphone-sized board, unless you use a noisy fan for cooling.
There exists also the fanless ODROID-N2, with a quadruple Cortex-A73, which, being well designed, has a larger board, which has an area similar to a smartphone or NUC.
The RPI4 has a too large CPU for its size, unless fan noise is considered acceptable.
B DDR4 memory (4GiB)
DDR4 4GiB with 32-bit bus width...