
$50 Odroid-C4 Raspberry Pi 4 Competitor Combines Amlogic S905X3 SoC with 4GB RAM - watchdogtimer
https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/04/23/50-odroid-c4-raspberry-pi-4-competitor-combines-amlogic-s905x3-soc-with-4gb-ram/
======
myself248
Thank goodness it's a regular HDMI connector. The mini and micro connectors
used on certain Pis add $5 to the cost the moment you want to actually use a
display.

~~~
Legogris
More like a bimonthly 5$ for every time the connector breaks, unless you leave
it in place and never touch it. micro-HDMI connectors are ridiculously
brittle.

(Had those interfaces on two laptops and I sighed deeply when I saw that the
RPi 4 had them as well)

------
chomp
But does it run a mainline Linux kernel? I hate how a lot of Hardkernel’s
stuff needs custom patches.

~~~
robert_foss
I don't think the RPi runs an entirely mainline kernel either.

~~~
gjsman-1000
It doesn't AFAIK, but it's getting there.

[https://github.com/lategoodbye/rpi-
zero/issues/43](https://github.com/lategoodbye/rpi-zero/issues/43)

------
snvzz
The highlights: 720mA on load, eMMC support and not being based on a broadcom
SoC. I am tempted to get one.

The raspberry pi was that way regarding power consumption in the beginning,
but it uses way too much power these days. It also has an infamously slow and
unreliable sdcard interface.

~~~
agumonkey
Forgot the rpi4 consumption. (1000-1200mA on load)

[https://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/power-
consumption](https://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/power-consumption)

------
DeathArrow
Still no cheap ARM board with SATA3 support.

Still no ARM board with a decently powerful CPU, SATA3, NVME, PCI-E x16,
USB3.2, and DDR4 slots.

It looks like ARM boards are pretty much the same, unless you want them for a
pretty niche application.

Also, software support is not quite the best.

~~~
gjsman-1000
Imagine if someone made a Snapdragon 865 SBC...

Or if Apple made an A13 SBC. They'd make a killing.

~~~
goda90
You could always buy a $1000+ Snapdragon development kit.
[https://shop.intrinsyc.com/products/snapdragon-865-mobile-
ha...](https://shop.intrinsyc.com/products/snapdragon-865-mobile-hardware-
development-kit)

------
Legogris
This looks like a compelling alternative to Rpi4B, and I'm happy they went
without WiFi/BT. I really wish we saw more boards like this with PoE support,
though - if nothing else as an optional hat to the board.

~~~
woodrowbarlow
raspberry foundation has a first-party PoE hat:
[https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/poe-
hat/](https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/poe-hat/)

~~~
Legogris
Yup, and so does Rock Pi (I think they're even cross-compatible).
Unfortunately the official Raspberry hat maxes out at 2.5A, which starts being
problematic if you add a single power-hungry peripheral, like an external USB
disk. I've even gotten warnings on insufficient power in dmesg with zero
peripherals attached on a 4B+.

So far I had no issues with DSLRKIT's third-party hats, though!

------
dmm
Does ffmpeg have access to the video decode acceleration on these boards?

Or is it an external binary that, for example, Kodi is using to decode?

------
mgulick
Having eMMC support is a game changer over a microSD card. It makes it feel
like a real computer.

~~~
zozbot234
A microSD card is just MMC that's socketed instead of being soldered to the
package/board. It's good for flexibility. With 4GB RAM, performance should be
a non-issue either way.

~~~
myself248
....over a narrow bus, and with controllers that have to make assumptions
about power being yanked at any moment so they can't do proper SSD-like things
that eMMC chips can do.

~~~
vardump
Narrow bus? I think current SD card standards can go way past 1GB per second
(note: see edit below). It's an implementation detail.

In practice, these cheap boards will have a cheap eMMC soldered in that can't
do these fancy things anyways. It's not going to be same quality chip like in
flagship phones.

Once that cheap eMMC fails, the device is bricked.

Edit: SD card standards still can't go past 1 GB/s, max 985 MB/s. Either way,
plenty for cheap SBCs.

~~~
jng
SD cards as present on Raspberry Pi, even the Pi 4, don't go beyond ~60MB/s.
Older Pis get around ~20MB/s. It's the worst bottleneck of the system. Where
do you get that 1 GB/s figure from?

~~~
vardump
Oh yes, another one of my pet peeves with Raspberry Pi: ancient slow SD
implementation.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card)

SD Express can do up to 985 MB/s.

SD UHS-II @300MB/s would be plenty for most SBCs.

~~~
dfox
Bear in mind that SD Express is SD only in name and otherwise it is just an
NVMe in SD form-factor. And how much UHS-II is still an SD is somewhat
questionable.

~~~
vardump
True. But on the other hand similar to how for example USB standard has
developed from USB 1.0 to USB 4.

While it would technically be correct, no one says new USB standard X is USB
in name only.

Perhaps every data transfer interface standard eventually adopts a PCI-e lane.
:-)

------
BubRoss
This has an A55, which I don't think is competitive with the raspberry pi 4
A72. The pi 4 was a huge breakthrough because it has a multi core out of order
cpu and starts at $35.

Something that people would buy over the pi 4 will have to be a later
generation A7X cpu without being more than double the price.

The better the CPU, the closer it comes to a lightweight desktop replacement,
child computer, TV computer, router replacement etc. The pi 4 is already
getting into that territory.

~~~
Legogris
Apart from that, I really think there's a gap on the market in terms of RAM.
Only since recently are there a select few SBCs with 4GB RAM, anything higher
than that and you're in the 200~250$+price-range with significantly higher
footprint in terms of size and power consumption.

It might be my personal ignorance, but I just don't see why you couldn't take
any of the more recent SoCs and throw at least 8GB on there? Do some of these
SoC vendors limit the address space or something..?

Right now this model is a nuanced alternative to the Rpi4B; a model with more
RAM would be a new segment in the market unlocking new possibilities.

~~~
rjsw
Some vendors do seem to limit their address space, there have been suggestions
that they just pasted an AArch64 CPU into one of their existing ARM SoC
designs.

------
mosselman
This is very interesting to me: H.265/H.264 60fps encoder

I could use this to re-encode my video collection without having to have my
main pc running for days/weeks.

~~~
gjsman-1000
NVIDIA Graphics cards, even my lowly GTX 1050, have an encoder called NVENC. I
don't use it though with my DVD rips though. When I tried using NVENC, it was
a bit faster than CPU, but the resulting file size was significantly larger to
get a similar quality level. Basically, NVENC was faster, but significantly
less efficient than CPU encoding is.

Because of that, any hardware encoder needs to be tested thoroughly before you
start encoding on it. It could be awesome, or you might not care about the
larger filesizes than CPU, but you need to do your research. However, at $50,
what do you have to lose? I'm just saying the odds of this board's ARM CPU
being better than NVIDIA's not-great encoder is slim.

The only other thing I'd point out is that Graphics Drivers for ARM are a
very, very mixed bag. Just because it supports H.265/H.264 encode does not
mean the software support is there. I remember a few years ago when the first
Chinese Pi clones started coming to market. They bragged about how the
hardware supported H.264 4K Decode - but didn't mention that the drivers to
support hardware acceleration of even basic GUI functions weren't there.
Again, do your research, but $50 is probably a good experiment.

~~~
DeathArrow
Intel CPUs have QuickSync (hardware encoder and decoder) since Sandy Bridge.
Using that is faster than using actual CPU cores.

~~~
gjsman-1000
I don't dispute the faster part, but I do dispute the end result. The end
result, in my experience, is always a larger file size for similar quality
than even a CPU set to High speed in Handbrake.

------
zihotki
So according to 7zip and unixbench benchmarks RPI 4 with out of order CPU on
1,5GHz is on par with Odroid C4 with in order CPU on 2GHz. And the price
you'll pay to get one will be closer to 70$ in EU including shipment costs or
reseller fees.

~~~
DeathArrow
For $30 I can get an used H61 board, i3-2100 and 4GB DDR3 RAM. That is going
to be much faster than both Raspberry and Odroid.

The ARM boards make sense only if you have power and size restrictions.

~~~
the1pato
Where?

~~~
DeathArrow
On local classified ads website.

------
ijager
Just like the RPi, no plated mounting holes for grounding. I am curious if
there is a valid reason not to use grounded mounting holes.

It is not easy to pass EMC tests if you want to embed these boards into some
device without proper grounding.

~~~
squarefoot
Is it possible that they might be relying on mounting frames for metal
enclosures or wired grounding near the power supply connector, just to avoid
ground loops?

~~~
ijager
Ah I guess. So you would design a custom frame that connects electrically to
the connector housing(s).

Might be a good accessory to sell.

------
acd
I think Odroid c4 will have a gpu advantage an area where traditionally
Raspberry Pi has been weak. It takes time and tweaking to get ok graphics out
of the pi. So Odroid may make for a better HTPC setup.

------
heyflyguy
Someone need to build a marketplace where you can rent these new little boards
that come out. I'm probably buying one every quarter, play with it for a day
or two and throw it on the pile.

good fun though

~~~
Yetanfou
There is a marketplace where you can sell those boards which more or less
serves the same purpose, probably at a lower price point.

~~~
syntheticnature
If we're talking something other than eBay, I'm curious where the marketplace
is.

~~~
Yetanfou
Not specifically eBay, I meant all sorts of second-hand selling methods, from
Craigslist through eBay and similar sites. Nothing special, really, just the
normal way of getting rid of stuff which just ends up taking up space
otherwise.

------
vardump
I hope next Raspberry Pi will finally upgrade to 64-bit memory bus. 32-bits is
just too narrow. If the price is an issue, lowest $35 tier could still be
32-bit.

------
sebdei
Anybody familiar with emulation on the Amlogic? I'm looking for a good SBC for
months now for HTPC & Emulation and was shortly before ordering a VIM3.
However, I read somewhere that Amlogic processors are not good for GPU tasks
like emulation due to unsupported drivers. Therefor, I looked at other Board
like the Rockpi N10. What you guys think?

~~~
karatestomp
1) x86 is pretty much always easier and better for (I assume, as you mentioned
HTPC, that you mean) game console emulation than other architectures, so if
you don't _have_ to have an SBC get a cheap, small x86 machine. Consider used
small-footprint business workstations.

2) Raspberry Pi has much better official and (especially) community software
support than other SBCs. Things like bluetooth or wifi are usually supported
better there, with fewer quirks and breakage, and software's usually more up
to date generally. You're rolling the dice with anything else if you're
looking for something you won't have to spend a bunch of time fiddling with or
fixing all the time.

~~~
snvzz
2) Raspberry Pi has much better official and (especially) community software
support than other SBCs.

I disagree, as my experience has been the opposite of this. RPis are always a
quirky mess, where doing anything but using turnkey appliance-like solutions
is painful, and even these turnkey solutions suffer from poor quality.

It's a low-effort, low-quality ecosystem, and my experience has been better
with each and every one of the alternatives I've used.

~~~
detaro
Which SBC would you recommend for a better ecosystem?

~~~
snvzz
I have had nothing but happiness from SBCs based Allwinner (sunxi) chips. My
experiences reflect A10, A20 and A64.

They have excellent community and Mainline Linux support:

[https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort](https://linux-
sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort)

Support in BSDs is similarly very good.

I'd pick among the boards that use the A20 (ARMv7) or the A64 (ARMv8 aarch64),
as these are the better supported chips.

Amlogic, iMX6, iMX8 and rockchip also have good reputation, from what I hear
from my acquaintances. But I haven't tried these myself.

Broadcom (used in RPI) is infamous, and it's a much deserved infamy. I've had
nothing but trouble with them, be it SoCs used on RPIs or other chips made by
them.

~~~
detaro
iMX6 is fine if you can live with the underpowered GPUs, although I couldn't
name a cheap universal SBC based on them, I've mostly encountered them in SOMs
in professional products. iMX8 is mixed from what I've heard, pretty bad
hardware issues initially, and iMX8M specifically is good. Similarly don't
know a good SBC yet.

Being cheap and widely available still does a lot for the Raspberry Pi for DIY
purposes IMHO, but I would be wary to base a product on it.

------
quezzle
The software lets down all raspberry pi alikes.

~~~
Legogris
Could you elaborate? I've tried boards from a couple of different vendors and
if anything, the proprietary stuff needed for Raspberry Pi has been the most
frustrating for me (apart from Android TV Boxes, but hey, we weren't
"supposed" to run Linux on those in the first place).

The 3B and 4B have their own different hacks needed to get normal Linux
distros running under 64bit, and it's nothing you can expect an average
hobbyist user to figure out even with the resources put out by people in the
community who have succeeded (unless they just flash some unsigned image
containing god knows what uploaded out by some rando on a forum).

~~~
quezzle
Don’t know what you mean by havks to run Linux. Rpi has excellent Linux.

You’ll just find tons of things that don’t work when you use anything but rpi.

~~~
snvzz
Can you elaborate?

My experience has been the opposite of this.

RPIs have always been the hardest boards to get working.

------
raphlinus
Does anyone know if these things support Vulkan? I know on the RPi4 it's being
worked on but will probably take a while.

[1]: [https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/vulkan-raspberry-pi-
first-t...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/vulkan-raspberry-pi-first-
triangle/)

~~~
DeathArrow
According to this [0] and this [1] it should.

[0] [https://developer.arm.com/ip-products/graphics-and-
multimedi...](https://developer.arm.com/ip-products/graphics-and-
multimedia/mali-gpus/mali-g31-gpu) [1]
[https://developer.arm.com/solutions/graphics-and-
gaming/apis...](https://developer.arm.com/solutions/graphics-and-
gaming/apis/vulkan/vulkan-drivers)

------
sgt
It's perhaps a bit dishonest to show a "UHD 4K video" being displayed in
Firefox and YouTube when there's no confirmation at all what kind of video
mode the player is running. It's probably 1080p or maybe 720p.

------
megous
Good thing is that it doesn't use 5V input directly, and you can connect it to
higher voltage power supply, and don't need to worry that much about cabling
and power supply quality.

------
simon1573
How well would this hold up as an HTPC? Any reasons to avoid it?

~~~
adrianN
A Raspberry Pi 3 is more than sufficient as a HTPC in my experience.

~~~
anfractuosity
Have you managed to get streaming services like netflix working without
stuttering per chance?

When I tried via a web browser a while ago I couldn't get it to work well,
iirc I had to install a plugin from somewhere too.

~~~
zihotki
If you want to stream high-quality content neither this one, nor it's older
brother N2 are not suitable due to DRM and other issues. You'd end-up spending
to much time to troubleshoot all problems.

Edit: I own Odroid N2, spent several weeks trying to make it working well. At
the end I've given up and got an Intel NUC device.

------
hajile
Lies, Dang Lies, Statistics, and not questioning data from the company selling
the board.

A55 is a 2-wide decode in-order architecture with 2 execution ports and 2.65
DMIPS.

A72 is a 3-wide decode out-of-order architecture with 8 execution ports and
4.72 DMIPS.

Obviously something is wrong here, so let's examine what it could be.

To get it out of the way, Mali G31 MP1 is theoretically slightly less
performance (20.8GFLOPS vs 24GFLOPS), but my money would be on the Mali being
much more efficient (the VideoCore architecture has been notoriously slower
than it's theoretical numbers would indicate).

Cache is another consideration. The Pi 4 uses 1mb of L2. I can't find anything
about the 905 except that it has L3 cache. The maximum L2 for A55 is 256kb. L3
can go up to 4MB. The s922x launched middle of last year and seems to have had
1mb of cache on it's A73 cores, so I would guess at less than that for a
lower-end chip. In any case, I'd put cache as equal at best.

Pi 4 uses 1-4gb LPDDR4-3200 vs some DDR4-1320 on the odroid. No matter how you
slice it though, something weird is going on here.

There is a default clockspeed difference (1.5GHz vs 2.0GHz), but it isn't
nearly as large as the actual performance per clock difference. Since the 905
is apparently rated to run at 1.9GHz, I suspect they slightly overclocked the
chips in their devices. I'd note that overclocking the Pi 4 to 2.0GHz is
easily doable, but I wouldn't expect them to do that as it can lower the life
expectancy of the chip (given the 8-stage A55 pipeline, I doubt that the 905
has much overclocking overhead).

On paper, the Pi 4 should be way faster at most of these things, so it must be
elsewhere.

The first stop is data storage. SD cards suck. They suck so much that a
spinning drive can usually get better performance. They desperately need to
launch a new Pi with a SATA port or PCIe port for a faster drive. eMMC is a
much better default option. The Pi loading benchmarks get 2-4x faster
(sometimes more) when a USB3 SSD is used. On the flip side though, if a
benchmark sits in RAM, you aren't going to notice a difference unless their
benches are including load time. That may be fine for a few things, but it
should be stated and it simply doesn't apply to a lot of real-world uses (for
example, loading a browser may be a little slower, but opening and using web
pages will not).

The next question is thermals. The 28nm Pi with larger cores definitely gets
hotter and throttles more than the 12nm smaller A55 cores. If they shoved the
pi into the default enclosure without a heatsink, it would definitely throttle
hard which would affect benchmarks significantly. I fully expect this to be
responsible for a large percentage of the performance disparity over what
would be expected. Testing the raw Pi would be much more fair. A small
heatsink would be more than fair and a fan would be overly-generous
(seriously, pi foundation needs to recommend and sell a heatsink and redo
their case design to accommodate a fan). I'd love for this to also be
disclosed.

The next issue is insidious and veers much closer to evil. Using the same OS
when possible should be a prerequisite for fair comparisons. Ubuntu team did
some great work and fixed the major bugs that were hurting 64-bit usage (USB
issues and 2-3GB RAM limit). I switched from Rasbian and there was a _very_
noticeable increase in performance. Those fixes have been available for almost
6 months and there's no reason not to use it for their testing other than
cooking the benches. We aren't talking small amounts either. 10% faster
memory, 50% higher dhrystone, 15% faster audio encoding, 2x faster network
performance, etc. I'm almost positive that they used Rasbian instead.

[https://medium.com/@matteocroce/why-you-should-
run-a-64-bit-...](https://medium.com/@matteocroce/why-you-should-run-a-64-bit-
os-on-your-raspberry-pi4-bd5290d48947)

No matter how you slice it though, they legit won the encryption benchmark by
a landslide. Broadcom didn't include the armv8 crypto extensions. It was a
dumb decision and one more thing that needs to be fixed on the next generation
pi.

