There has been a new SBC (single board computer) released.
Generally by the time you buy a computer, its out of date. SBC’s are no different. Many of them came before the Raspberry Pi, many have and will came after the Pi.
(Its just that the community really got behind the Pi and thus it was a huge success).
Most post Pi SBC’s have been more powerful and thus more expensive. This has really mitigated the impact of these also-rans.
This new board changes that – in fact, it totally turns it on its head…..
It’s the same price as the Pi.
So, what do you get for your 35 bucks?
A whole lota computer……
KEY FEATURES
Powerful Linux/Android Computer
1.5GHz quad-core CPU, dual-core GPU, 1GB RAM 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet with RJ-45 LAN jack 4 x high speed USB2.0 host ports 40 GPIO pins (quasi-Raspberry Pi compatible – pins 37, 38, and 40 are not compatible with the Pi B+ as they are dedicated for analog inputs) Linux or Android available Size: 85 x 56 x 18 mm Weight: 40g
This is a bit of a game changer for me….. The Pi has always been so underpowered, that frankly to use it for much more than monitoring a toaster or decoding aircraft transponders is just a painful experience.
This board on the other hand has enough grunt to do some real work.
Computing performance comparison – Odroid vs Pi.
We ran a simple, popular benchmark called Unix-Bench (version 5.1.3) to compare the performance of the two boards.
The RPi was clocked at 800Mhz using a Sandisk UHS-1 8GB SDCard running the Debian Wheezy OS. The C1 was clocked at 1.5Ghz using an 16GB eMMC with Ubuntu 14.04 OS. Both units were powered by a 5V/2A power supply and connected to the 1920×1080 HDMI output. Note that in order to utilize all four cores in the C1, the “./run –c 4” command was used.
Benchmarks(Index Score) RPi Model B+ ODROID-C1 Ratio Dhrystone-2 using register variables 162.1 1262.8 7.8 Double-Precision Whetstone 56.2 439.6 7.8 Execl Throughput 61.6 489.4 7.9 File Copy 4K bufsize, 8000 maxblocks 187.9 778.4 4.1 Pipe Throughput 164.1 610.4 3.7 Pipe-based Context Switching 62.7 467.0 7.4 Process Creation 68.2 371.8 5.5 Shell Scripts (1 concurrent) 117.2 874.4 7.5 Shell Scripts (8 concurrent) 106.2 853.8 8.0 System Call Overhead 290.5 1999.7 6.9 Total Index Score 109.8 622.3 5.7 The results show that the Dhrystone-2 benchmark is about 8 times faster on the C1. File I/O benchmark is about 4 times faster because of the faster storage speed of the eMMC module. Overall performance test result show that the C1 is approximately 6 times faster than the RPi, even though the price of C1 is exactly same.
For 35 bucks this thing can not be ignored.
The reports coming back from those guys that have already got their hands on one is that it really is all that it’s cracked up to be.
They are able to run Open Office on it, games, stream full HD videos and more. It’s very close in performance to a Google Chrome Laptop.
Soon as I get some time, I will probably be ordering one.
I would like to get another aircraft USB device up and running for more general software radio work (I will leave the Pi in the roof doing the whole transponder thing).
There are a lot of other cool things you can do with the whole software radio thing, but I did not want to tie up my laptop doing it. This Odroid-C1 will be perfect.
