Odroid-C1 Preview: $35 Quad-Core SBC in a Raspberry Pi like form factor
December 23rd, 2014ODROID announced a very interesting single board computer while I was fighting the flu… the ODROID-C1 for only $35
(click on image for larger version – image courtesy of hardkernel.com)
You can clearly see that the major features are very attractive:
- quad core Amlogic ARM6 Cortex-A5 (ARMv7) running at 1.5GHz
- Mali™-450 MP2 GPU (OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1 enabled for Linux and Android)
- 1GB DDR3 32 bit memory at 792MHz
- 40 pin GPIO header, 92.75% compatible with the Raspberry Pi Model A+ / B+ (37 of 40 pins)
- two 10 bit ADC channels (which along with 1.8Vref are the three different pins on the GPIO header)
- four USB2.0 host ports
- one micro USB OTG port
- 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet port
- eMMC4.5 HS200 Flash Storage slot
- UHS-1 SDR50 MicroSD Card slot
- on-board Real Time Clock (with battery connector)
- IR receiver
- DC adapter jack to support more current than micro USB
- Ubuntu 14.04 support
- Android KitKat (4.4) support
Here is a block diagram:
(click on image for larger version – image courtesy of hardkernel.com)
Hardkernel ran a number of benchmarks comparing the ODROID-C1 to the Raspberry Pi, here is a summary of their results:
- 7.8x faster than Pi for Dhrystone-2
- 9.9x faster than Pi for double precision Whetstone
- 4.1x faster for file copy
- close to 600Mbps on a Gigabit network
(I plan on reviewing the ODROID-C1 in the near future, and I will put it through the wringer)
Basically up to eight times the floating point and integer performance – not too shabby!
In order to keep the price so ridiculously low, two Raspberry Pi features were dropped:
- there is no camera connector
- there is no LCD connector
Here is the back of the board – note the eMMC connector and uSD slot:
(click on image for larger version – image courtesy of hardkernel.com)
It will be interesting to see how the ODROID-C1 will do in the marketplace – it certainly has a lot of horsepower for the price.
The Raspberry Pi has about four million installed units, and an incredibly active user forum, serving educational users everywhere.
The ODROID-C1 is aimed more at technical users who need more “oomph”, and don’t need dedicated camera/lcd connectors.
I suspect the ODROID-C1 will find a niche – and supporting Ubuntu and Android 4.4 certainly give it different markets than Raspbian.
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