ODROID-C1 – Quad Core ARM Linux computer

http://hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php

by joshbaptiste • 12 years ago

133 82 12 years ago

what display outputs does it have? I didn't see any in the summary, which makes this a different market than the raspberry pi

praeivis• 12 years ago

1.5 GHz Quad core and 1Gb RAM not enough difference?

jszymborski• 12 years ago

and a 3D hardware acceleration... this thing is so cool.

For $35 you can get a really decent computer. Makes it really viable for people to run a small unix dev machine or buy a bunch of these to run a miniature server farm.

mivok• 12 years ago

Micro HDMI. You have to go to the technical details tab to see it mentioned.

agumonkey3• 12 years ago

Curious about the power consumption.

PythonicAlpha3• 12 years ago

In some other news, I read something about ~2x that of a Raspberry, I think it was about 0,5A. That seems to me a fair deal for much more speed.

Also you get a 1GBit Ethernet port, I think Raspberry has only 100MBit/s.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

With that chip you should get around 2.5x faster single-thread performance (mostly due to the higher clock speed), and 3 more cores inside as well.

throwawayaway2• 12 years ago

curious to know how the port is implemented - if it's wedged in to the USB bus like on the pi that has performance implications.

mdda• 12 years ago

According to the Technical Detail tab : "5V2A DC input : This is for 5V power input, with an inner diameter of 0.8mm, and an outer diameter of 2.5mm. The ODROID-C1 consumes less than 0.5A in most cases, but it can climb to 2A if many passive USB peripherals are attached directly to the main board. "

PythonicAlpha3• 12 years ago

I heard something, that the software (hardware drivers and other things) support for these not so much sold devices is sparse. Does anybody know more? I guess, they ported some Linux on it, but how about media server software (like XBMC/Kodi) and other stuff??

fredsted• 12 years ago

A lot of people in the HTPC community are buying these things for just that purpose. This board should be excellent as a HTPC.

carlhu• 12 years ago

I have the Odroid XU3 (which I think runs the same version of their Ubuntu). XBMC/Kodi runs on it, but I get a crash intermittently when fast forwarding a movie. VLC works perfectly. Chromium and Firefox runs superbly. I was unable to get Flash working so Amazon Instant Video and HBOGo don't work. Wireless with the $8 usb dongle they sell works perfectly.

rcarmo4• 12 years ago

You should check the ODROID forum for newer graphics drivers. The bleeding edge versions are released every now and then as separate binaries/images.

papaf2• 12 years ago

Have you tried the pepper flash player?

http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2374

LaurensBER• 12 years ago

Amlogic is known around the XBMC/Kodi forums for their excellent OSS VPU drivers and boxes using this chipset are usually among the most recommended.

This new chipset (S805) should also be able to support H.265 videos, the first patches for it have already appeared on the mailing list.

I can't comment on VDPAU support but for Kodi this board should be pretty awesome :)

rcarmo4• 12 years ago

This should run most of the existing Ubuntu and Android images without any hassle. Having owned an ODROID-U2 for a long while now, I can tell you that these things run Ubuntu 14.04 like a dream (except for the lack of OpenGL - you only get ES) and Android works great:

http://the.taoofmac.com/space/blog/2013/02/10/1230

(Mine is now running Ubuntu only, and the only gripe I have is that the kernel currently lacks enough group support to run Docker - that's only a recompile away, but I like my uptime...)

nglinh23122• 12 years ago

How does it perform for Computer Vision/ Image Processing tasks? Couldn't find anything mentioning openCL or anything of the sort

jws• 12 years ago

No OpenCL for Mali 450.

throwawayaway2• 12 years ago

form factor is clever, should be a drop in replacement for most people's pi cases too!

http://linuxgizmos.com/35-dollar-quad-core-hacker-sbc-offers...

rcarmo4• 12 years ago

The power socket is on the side, and the HDMI connector is now a micro. There will be some adjustment required...

morganvachon• 12 years ago

I have a RPi B+ case from ModMyPi that is fantastic, I bet they'd be willing to modify it for the ODROID-C1 if enough people asked.

aseidl• 12 years ago

If anyone else is interested, it sounds like HDMI-CEC should be working within the next week or so.

http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=7479#p58825

mikecarlton• 12 years ago

Anybody make something similar with dual ethernet? I'd like to replace my aging Alix-based home router/vpn (http://www.pcengines.ch/alix2d3.htm) with something like this.

papaf2• 12 years ago

The mirabox has dual ethernet and arch linux support is good. The box is a little expensive and I have never got wifi to work but as a router/firewall it does the job:

https://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/c-14-gtimirabox.aspx

q3k• 12 years ago

Try the PCEngines APU board! http://www.pcengines.ch/apu.htm

The only downside is it uses Realtek NICs instead of Intel ones. Otherwise it's pretty much perfect.

joshu• 12 years ago

Where can I buy these?

noselasd• 12 years ago

You can stick an USB NIC or two in it, if 100M ethernet is enough.

vld• 12 years ago

I'm using http://tostarcn.en.alibaba.com/product/1955500912-222121763/... and it was worth the $170 I paid, really.

voltagex_• 12 years ago

Do you think there's an advantage of using this over an Intel NUC? I'm looking for a low power board to replace an aging Dreamplug [1]

1: https://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-dreamplugdetails.a...

mcpherrinm• 12 years ago

The Novena board looks pretty shiny for this. Mine should come in any day, and I plan to at least try it out for this purpose. Unfortunately it isn't dual gigabit though, so it'll bottleneck my internet a little bit.

ccwu660601• 12 years ago

If 100M is enough for you, I'm developing a new board with 2 RJ45 for industrial ethernet, which has a 40 pin connector compatible to that of RPi B+, but the circuit is adapted from beaglebone black. It's scheduled for end of January 2015.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X9RrbkUpiTQ-S6Acken-5fv7...

joshbaptiste• 12 years ago

I'm very interested in your board as it would probably make for a great *BSD firewall, do you have any contacts? as I cannot find any on that page.

Ecio78• 12 years ago

would be interesting to know if this odroid is better or worse than a device like Cubox[1] and CuboxTV[2]. They are more expensive but they include case, power supply etc..

[1] http://www.solid-run.com/products/cubox-i-mini-computer/ [2] http://www.solid-run.com/cuboxtv/

ekr• 12 years ago

With lots of 64bit ARM chips coming to the market in the near future, I would wait just a little bit more.

happycube• 12 years ago

It's cheap enough that one could still get their money's worth out of this while waiting, though :)

Rarebox• 12 years ago

This board only has 1GB RAM and no support for fast secondary storage (only USB2) so having 64bit address space would provide little benefit.

0x02• 12 years ago

I'm sure there are other advantages to AArch64, like a larger set of registers, that could still make it worthwhile. At the very least it might push down the prices on the old armv7 CPUs.

biggerfisch• 12 years ago

Their technical details page seems to push eMMC pretty hard but their prices, 64GB for $80 [1], seem really high compared to a microSD card. Can anyone with experience comment on whether the eMMC has anywhere near the value for its price?

[1] http://hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G14...

simlevesque• 12 years ago

I bought a Odroid-U3 and pretty often the bottleneck was on the microSD card so I grew tired of it and I bought a eMMC 64gb and it gets the job done. It is way faster than the best microSD if that is what you were wondering.

tankenmate• 12 years ago

Some eMMC modules claim 150MB/s read/write; i.e. same speed as hard drives from about 5-7 years ago. Or put another way approximately twice as fast as an average USB3 flash drive.

beagle32• 12 years ago

You had a 150MB/s hard drive 5 years ago? What kind of a drive was that?

I'm only getting 100-150MB/sec on rotating media today. Only 7.2K, but even 5 years ago, 10K didn't deliver that transfer speed from what I remember.

monocasa3• 12 years ago

Yes, it does. SD cards are not really designed for being used as a root file system. They are OK at streaming writes and reads, but once you start getting non sequential they slow down like you wouldn't believe. Which, yes, I know, is super weird for what should just be some glue logic around a NAND.

I was investigating corruption and performance problems with our root filesystem on an SD card. The cards would be great a obvious benchmark style tasks, but when I recorded the block access pattern from our driver and replayed that on a Linux desktop with O_DIRECT, we'd not only get under 200KiB/s average access speed (which matched what we were seeing on the embedded system), but we would also get corrupted sectors (ie. we write it just fine, but we just get an error back from the card when we go to read the sector) in less than a day of sustained writes (once again at only 200KiB/s). And this was with high quality SanDisk cards that were then verified by them to be real cards (for a while we thought that clones had made their way into our supply chain). Using a weird form factor eMMC chip in an SD card got rid of these issues. There's also "industrial" SD cards that are around the same price that I suspect are basically the same thing.

kragen6• 12 years ago

Most SD and μSD cards have embedded microcontrollers http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554 — I wonder how much of the corrupted-sector problems you were getting are really just bugs in their firmware? Or things that could be worked around with better firmware?

hardwaresofton2• 12 years ago

EMMC is worth it, I have the ODroid U2 and am about to purchase the one at this link, and would not skip out on the EMMC for anything. SD card bottleneck is real.

ansible• 12 years ago

With eMMC you can have an 8-bit data bus (instead of 4) and higher clock speed.

0x02• 12 years ago

I wonder what kind of "license issues" are present in the current software?

"U-boot/Kernel/Linux source code will be released 15-Dec-2014. Android source code will be published in February after cleaning some license issues."

Looks like the biggest problem with most of these ARM boards (raspberry pi included) is the dependency on some closed-source binary blobs, at least for boot, and sometimes even the entire kernel is a closed branch off some old release.

joezydeco3• 12 years ago

I've never dealt with an ARM core that needed some magic object-only blob to boot. They're almost all using Denx U-Boot.

If the GPU needs an object loaded to boot, like the RPi, that's another story. But a decent SoC should be able to start without the GPU getting in the way.

pygy_• 12 years ago

IIRC, for the Raspberry Pi, the GPU controls the CPU (or, at least, it boots first), which makes the blob necessary.

ilaksh2• 12 years ago

Is it possible to buy a tablet display without the actual tablet computer? I want something inexpensive and lightweight and efficient to pair with this for display and a regular lcd monitor isn't that.

shock• 12 years ago

This might be what you're looking for: http://hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G14...

ilaksh2• 12 years ago

Ok yes that's it except I just bought a quad core tablet and it only cost like $150 so the screen by itself should not be $120. I mean you can buy tablets for $50..

Heres one for around $50 http://www.buydisplay.com/default/7-hdmi-lcd-module-display-...

imrehg• 12 years ago

The SoC seems to be Cortex-A5, while many of the other boards around are Cortex-A9. Looking at the comparison between those two types, that might have been one of the trade-off made, as the A5 is targeting the lower end devices, and has less performance than a same clock rate/core count A9.

It's not necessarily bad, but good to know for better comparison.

hardwaresofton2• 12 years ago

Just wanted to post that my interaction with (and purchases from) ODROID have been fantastic. They also have this really cool magazine they release from time to time:

http://magazine.odroid.com/assets/201412/pdf/ODROID-Magazine... (that's Dec. 2014's issue)

It's a great platform to learn on, no fuss ordering (a little waiting), and the platform is both cheap (they're one of the rare companies that has reduced the price of a product going from one release to another).

Also, the C1 beats the pants of Pi B+. :)

No complaints here.

kragen6• 12 years ago

This looks pretty cool. How well documented is its GPU?

The Raspberry Pi folks managed to pry documentation out of Broadcom http://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/VideoCoreIV-A..., with an FFT example included in the standard distro https://github.com/raspberrypi/userland/blob/master/host_app..., resulting in porting the Deep Belief image-recognition SDK to that GPU http://www.raspberrypi.org/more-qpu-magic-from-pete-warden/ and SHA-256 http://rpiplayground.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/hacking-the-gp...

I'd love to be able to do that kind of thing on the ODROID-C1, especially since its GPU sounds like it's a lot faster! I see that they're designed by ARM rather than Broadcom, and there's a reverse-engineering effort that has produced something of a GL implementation on them http://limadriver.org/ that has Quake 3 Arena running on it already, and faster than the binary driver, but not yet playable https://libv.livejournal.com/23886.html; but that effort seems to have stalled last year. But it sounds like it was, at the time, limited to working from reverse engineering rather than official documentation https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/operating_sys..., and while ARM has a lot of development documentation on their Mali site http://malideveloper.arm.com/develop-for-mali/sample-code/, none of it seems to be for the GPU itself, but rather for the OpenGL ES implementation they've written for it.

So what's the deal? Is the GPU really actually totally undocumented officially, with the only available information being a dead open-source project that produced a half-complete free-software OpenGL implementation for it by reverse engineering? Or is there more stuff out there I'm missing?

(In any case, it's pretty incredible that in 2014 you can already buy an 8-processor single-board computer that you can program for US$35.)

AReallyGoodName• 12 years ago

I have the Odroid-U3 which is similar enough.

It's amazing running Android. The drivers are all there and it can do 1080p playback no worries. Netflix for Android runs perfectly. So does every emulator going from the N64 generation back. Easily the best box short of a media PC to connect to your TV at the moment.

It's not as good with standard Linux. The graphics drivers aren't there at all. 1080p playback doesn't really work. Example link you can read up on yourself- http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=3214

kragen6• 12 years ago

I think you may have replied to the wrong comment, since what you said has nothing at all to do with what I was asking or saying in the comment of mine to which you attached it.

pjc502• 12 years ago

A bit of link chasing lead me to http://petewarden.com/2014/08/07/how-to-optimize-raspberry-p... which opens with this extraordinary sentence:

"When I was at Apple, I spent five years trying to get source-code access to the Nvidia and ATI graphics drivers"

That's at one of the richest development partners in the world. The secrecy is crippling.

patrickg_zill• 12 years ago

Can these be netbooted, thus, not needing an SD or eMMC card at all?

nglinh23122• 12 years ago

has anyone tried running openCV on this thing?

ODROID-C1 – Quad Core ARM Linux computer

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