
Radxa: $100 Quad-Core ARM Raspberry Pi Alternative - lclark
http://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/774426-radxa-the-100-quad-core-arm-raspberry-pi-alternative
======
arjie
There are hundreds of these mini-computers and they always have poor support
because the community is small and the makers just abandon the product.
They're like Nokia phones back in the day, you get what you buy and that's it.

The Raspberry Pi has a great community around it that's doing all sorts of
things. Multiple independent distros exist and it's a well understood system.
This alone makes it superior for many uses than any of these alternatives.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
How big of a community do you need? What's the critical mass?

The beagleboard been around for sometime, except it used to run you around
$200. You could trivially put a linux distro on a beagleboard before the Pi
even existed. Heck, the Beagleboard Black comes with Debian installed and goes
for $55 now. Not too bad.

The reality is that the Pi just delivered a very low cost and now they sit in
drawers and landfills because Joe Hacker got over the "shiny shiny" aspect of
owning it pretty quickly. The same way he has a Wii and a Rock Band set in the
basement in a box labeled, "Stuff."

I suspect that the slighter higher cost of entry means that things like the
beagleboards are in use doing something interesting while most Pis are either
junked or running blinkinglights.sh and will never be touched again.

~~~
Nursie
I'm not sure why people need this stuff either. Put debian on the machine, get
access to everything from the debian repos. What more do you actually need?

------
jedahan
Why compare it to a pi if the price is 2.5x the pi - its a different class of
device. Hey check out this Radxa alternative that has a built-in FPGA, dual
nic, and is even faster! [http://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-
laptop/](http://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop/)

:(

~~~
Fuzzwah
Because once you add a case, sd card and wifi adapter to the r-pi the costs
are about the same.

~~~
vardump
RPi case is $5, wifi adapter $10, power supply $5.

------
helper
I've evaluated a lot of embedded arm dev boards. The first thing I look at is
"Can I run a stock kernel on this board?" If the answer is no, its really a
deal breaker. Without a stock kernel you are at the mercy of the vendor for
upgrades. And most vendors are really bad at shipping up to date kernel
patches.

~~~
joezydeco
And to go a little deeper, "Can I get a full TRM for the chip?"

Freescale and TI are pretty solid in this area. The i.MX6 TRM is a freely
available 7000+ page PDF.

AllWinner and RockChip? Not counting on it. I went through an ordeal with
Ingenic (nee ChinaChip) where it took three levels of pleading with reps to
get a badly-translated 50-page document.

~~~
vonmoltke
I spent so much time with TI and Motorola chips, first in undergrad then at a
division of Raytheon that used to be TI, that I got spoiled by being able to
pick up a document that had detailed descriptions of every functional unit,
external signal, programmable register, and instruction. Then I ventured
outside that world, where I couldn't even _buy_ some chips without signing an
NDA and submitting a fucking business plan.

~~~
joezydeco
I hear ya. And that's where I think some people have gotten lulled by the
Raspberry Pi when it comes to these boards.

IMO there's a difference between true eval/dev boards and the (for lack of a
better word) _devices_ that are following along the lines of the RPi.

Dev boards used to be large expensive things that did require NDAs and a
healthy business relationship with a chipmaker and local FAE. Could you afford
the $4K for an OMAP1 eval board? I couldn't.

I'm glad to see some of that stuff come back down to earth, especially now
that the big players are cooperating with more-open projects like Beagle/Panda
and SABRE. And they're at least following it up with a more open attitude when
it comes to documentation, drivers/kernel branches, and online support.

------
cs02rm0
Unfortunately the software support seems seriously lacking for a lot of these
RPi competitors, I'd be reluctant to get one without seeing a sizeable
community behind it. Parallela looks to be another interesting alternative.

~~~
Nursie
Find something that runs a 'normal' distro like debian. Have a generic but
tiny machine.

Why would you need a specific hardware community?

~~~
zhemao
The RPi can run "normal" distributions in a sense, but all ARM boards need
some degree of software customization because there is a lot less
standardization in the interfaces to hardware peripherals. x86 CPUs have a
standard interface called PCI with which they can dynamically probe what sort
of peripherals are attached to them. ARM CPUs don't have such an interface, so
connections to peripherals have to be configured in the kernel at compile-
time.

~~~
Nursie
Well aware of this! But once you have a distro with suitable kernel, again,
why would you need a board-specific community?

~~~
zhemao
The kernel isn't the only thing. What about drivers? Getting random hardware
peripherals to work with a single-board computer is not always
straightforward. A larger community means there is more documentation out
there on how to get things working.

~~~
Nursie
But once it's a peripheral the drivers are loaded as modules and it doesn't
matter what the board is ... ?

Sorry, just don't really get it. Been running debian on (mostly headless) ARM
boards for about a decade now and I don't really grok why a community around a
particular board is that useful. Once you have a system you have a system...

------
mapt
At this point it's not that these things aren't advances on the Raspberry Pi,
it's that the barrier to entry is so low that they're coming out several times
a month and there's no reason for the community to center on any one
particular platform, no 'killer app' that works not just twice as well as the
competition, but 20x as well. To convince the Raspberry Pi community to switch
en masse, that is what we're looking for: outliers on the price/performance
chart. That's hard to do at $100, from a brand nobody has heard of before,
with no guarantee of substantive investment in the future of the product.

------
mschuster91
Interesting project. The biggest question though is: can VLC/omxplayer/ffmpeg
utilize the GPU for h264 decoding/encoding?

~~~
lgeek
On ARM SoCs you generally can't really talk about 'the GPU'. There are
separate:

* 3D accelerator, which is what some people call the GPU, but it only does 3D acceleration (OpenGL ES in most cases) and on newer models it can also run OpenCL - not the case on this SoC which has a Mali-400. This is working with closed source drivers on GNU/Linux.

* a video decoder and sometimes a video encoder, Hantro G1[0] and Hantro H1[1] on this hardware. These are unsupported on GNU/Linux, possibly because Android uses its libstagefright[2] infrastructure and there's limited demand for GNU/Linux support.

* sometimes a 2D accelerator, which would mostly be used for blits, resizing and rotation nowadays. RK3188 actually has two different units with overlapping functionality and which work on GNU/Linux with open source drivers.

Even though the video decoder is unsupported on GNU/Linux, the ARM cores are
fast enough to decode 720p and (with some frame loss) 1080p h264 video. I
wrote an XV driver[3] for RK3188 which uses hardware support for colorspace
conversion and video resizing together with a few other tricks.

[0]
[http://www.verisilicon.com/IPPortfolio_14_58_2_HantroG1.html](http://www.verisilicon.com/IPPortfolio_14_58_2_HantroG1.html)

[1]
[http://www.verisilicon.com/IPPortfolio_14_82_2_HantroH1.html](http://www.verisilicon.com/IPPortfolio_14_82_2_HantroH1.html)

[2]
[https://source.android.com/devices/media.html](https://source.android.com/devices/media.html)

[3] [https://github.com/lgeek/xf86-video-
fbturbo](https://github.com/lgeek/xf86-video-fbturbo)

~~~
mschuster91
Hmm. Is it possible to extract that "libstagefright" stuff from Android and
port it over to generic Linux?

------
majke
Quad core doesn't excite me. Low power usage does.

Does anyone know Raspberry Pi alternative that uses little power and supports
low power states?

AFAIK RPI has pretty flat power usage at ~500-1000mA. BeagleBone Black seems
to be lower power (~200mA?) but it's hard to verify this claim.

(I need a box that will mostly stay idle but online, for things like ssh
servers)

~~~
dublinben
I can confirm that the BBB uses no more than 500mA while running intensive
tasks. I have mine connected to a power supply that only provides that much,
and it hasn't had any issues.

------
pnathan
There's also the ODROID U3 from hardkernel, which is in the $60-70 range.
Similar specs in terms of computing, I think.

I use these sorts of things as low-power quiet servers for at-home foolery,
not for actual home automation, the GPIO stuff is generally wasted on me. =)

~~~
jeffasinger
That's not exactly comparable, because this has Wifi and Bluetooth on board.

------
lttlrck
Given the title I was expected a comparison with the Raspberry Pi.

~~~
mschuster91
Performance-wise, _everything_ is better than a RPi, simply because the Pi's
design is (iirc) 2 years old.

Seriously, I'd have nothing against a i/o compatible RPi Model C with a state-
of-the-art chipset, gbit ethernet directly wired into the SoC and maaaybe even
on-board WiFi/GSM. It's time for an update...

~~~
Joeboy
Why not just get one of the many slightly better but more expensive RPi
competitors, and keep the Pi (almost) standard?

The Pi was never state of the art. IMO losing the standardness in return for
better performance would be a poor trade.

~~~
mschuster91
As long as the HW interface is the same (i.e. all connectors at the same
place, same pinout) and the SW interface stays the same (e.g. GPIOs mapped at
the same places), then you could just drop in a "RPi C" and have vastly bigger
resources at your hand.

------
jwatte
If I want a $30 device, I get a pi. If I want to actually spend money, I get a
NUC. $100 is a terrible price point for most hobbyist gear -- too expensive
for cheap-os, too poor support for real work. Just ask the hard kernel /
odroid guys - they have eight cores at about the same price point.

~~~
lgeek
> Just ask the hard kernel / odroid guys - they have eight cores

Of which you can only use 4 at a time because Exynos 5410 is broken.

> at about the same price point.

69% more expensive.

------
rwmj
Mele A1000G Quad is probably a better bet. Both of them are _not_ very well
supported by upstream Linux, but the Mele / AllWinner A31 has been around
longer and so has had a bit more work done to figure it out. Also the A31
supports hardware virtualization.

[http://linux-sunxi.org/index.php?title=Mele_M9](http://linux-
sunxi.org/index.php?title=Mele_M9)

If you want better than RPi, well-supported upstream and with a good
community, then go for the dual core A20-based Cubietruck. This also supports
hardware virt, and is generally a great development kit.

[http://linux-sunxi.org/Cubietech_Cubietruck](http://linux-
sunxi.org/Cubietech_Cubietruck)

~~~
edwintorok
Any idea why the Cubie* boards are listed as not open on this page?
[https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TargetedHardware](https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/TargetedHardware)

~~~
rwmj
MALI GPU (ARM's proprietary GPU core), would be at least one reason.

I'm running a completely open source u-boot, kernel and userspace on mine.
With the exception of a tiny bootloader[1] which just sets clocks at very
early boot. However my open source chain doesn't support some bits of the
hardware, although it supports all the bits I care about (serial port, SATA,
MMC, virtualization).

[1] This first stage bootloader was probably written in assembly, and has been
disassembled and annotated, but no official source is available for it AIUI.

------
higherpurpose
Still hoping Raspberry Pi would make a dual-core Cortex A53 (ARMv8) version
for 2015. At 28nm, it should be pretty cheap by then.

I think dual-core would be preferable to single core, even if it's more
expensive than their target, because so many projects are trying to put a
"full OS" on Raspberry Pi, and a dual core version would serve that much
better in a real world usage scenario (like for education in poor schools and
such).

~~~
pjc50
Which Broadcom part did you have in mind?

 _dual core version would serve that much better in a real world usage
scenario_

Explain how this is significantly more educational, or how lack of CPU is some
how debilitating to current use.

------
coreymgilmore
I would have expected a bit more software support from the get go. Only
Android and Linaro...a little light for me. To be a beaglebone or Rpi
competitor, they will need some more support in terms of OSes and packages.
One of the greatest parts to the Pi/BB isnt the cheapness of the hardware, its
the fact that almost every linux package runs on them.

------
dchichkov
Is there some dual-core / quad core board that has an 8-channel (or more)
ADC/DAC onboard? I'm looking for some multicore board that has ADC/DAC, rather
than GPIO...

~~~
convivialdingo
Check out Pololu, they have several adc/dac options. Their maestro servo
boards have options there too, over micro USB.

------
atmosx
Can this run a Digital Signage software which supports multiple channels?

------
lgeek
I've been hacking Rockchip RK3188-based devices for a few months now. What
caught my attention are the low cost Android PC-on-a-stick and tablets using
this SoC. We're talking about $50-ish delivered for a PC-on-a-stick with 2GB
of RAM, HDMI output and a WiFi+Bluetooth adapter and $150-$200 for a decently
built tablet with similar specs, some even having high-DPI screens.

Radxa Rock (the article keeps talking about 'the Radxa' when that's the name
of the company selling Radxa Rock, by the way) is similar to the various PC-
on-a-stick, but in a development board form factor and with more I/Os and GPIO
exposed.

Rockchip only provides support for Android and more recently Chrome OS, with
GNU/Linux support being mostly community developed. The good news is that most
hardware is working on GNU/Linux, with the exception of the video decoder and
encoder (which is typical for most SoCs)and the NAND driver is closed source
because it includes the flash translation layer which is treated as a trade
secret by flash vendors. The bad news is that the kernel code developed by
Rockchip is a bit crap and the community forks are quite fragmented because
there's no central place to centralize various patches. Even so, it's
generally straightforward to add support for a new board. We have a wiki[0]
and an IRC channel - #linux-rockchip on Freenode if you're interested. The
Radxa guys maintain their own fork so at least for their platform it's clear
what to use.

I'd say it's a good choice for running Android or for hacking or for doing
processing tasks (things like a building packages, running a low power
webserver, continuous integration, etc) on GNU/Linux.

Some people in this thread ask/complain about platform-specific GNU/Linux
distributions. There's Picuntu[1], but my view is that platform-specific
distros are completely unnecessary and even a bit silly. On x86 you don't run
Thinkpad-Ubuntu, you just run the generic Ubuntu. This is no different for ARM
computers, you can use any generic distribution with a ARM port, with a kernel
image compiled for your hardware and maybe one or two other drivers which need
to be set up in userspace.

Compared to RPi, RK3188 (and other similar SoC) devices have a massive
advantage since it's ARMv7 while RPi is ARMv6 which most distros don't support
anymore. The difference in CPU performance compared to Raspberry can't be
understated, it has 4 cores which are maybe 2 to 4 times faster for most
workloads, about three times the memory bandwidth, four times the RAM, etc.

[0] [http://linux-rockchip.info/](http://linux-rockchip.info/) [1]
[http://home.g8.net/](http://home.g8.net/)

~~~
kbart
Did you manage find full RK3188 TRM? I would be interested to play with
GNU/Linux on this board, but there's not much you can do without a decent
documentation..

