
ODROID-C2 Compared to Raspberry Pi 3 and Orange Pi Plus - geerlingguy
http://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/review-odroid-c2-compared-raspberry-pi-3-and-orange-pi-plus
======
matt_wulfeck
The real game-changer to me was the eMMC slot. SD cards are just so pitifully
slow that it's unbearable to ever do any kind of disk IO on the pi. Even
running apt-get update took forever.

~~~
geerlingguy
I hope to get a card for the ODROID and run some of these tests again...
Should've ordered it with my initial purchase so I don't have to spend another
$7 on shipping!

Judging by the built-in eMMC on the Orange Pi, it's a substantial I/O boost,
at least 4-8x faster than even the best microSD card.

~~~
avian
It would also be interesting to know how eMMC compares to the SATA interface
that used to be available on old Allwinner SoCs before they canned it.

I bought a CubieTruck (Allwinner A20) and a SATA SSD drive simply because it
seemed to be the only cheap ARM board with decent I/O performance.

~~~
chx
Explain this to me as one hackernews reader to another: how come people are
buying Allwinner stuff? Are you not aware of the repeated GPL violations or do
you think undermining all of our work is not enough of a problem to warrant a
boycott?

~~~
tagrun
Extending this logic, we should also avoid anything from China or any country
with an oppressive regime, which have repeatedly been violating human rights
(which I think is more important that violation of a software license).

In fact, if we're talking ethics and politics now, there's also labor, abuse
of workers and local people losing their jobs to cheap overseas workers
issues.

------
im_down_w_otp
I bought five of these to do some Erlang, Rust, and Pony-lang distributed
systems programming and testing on. Lack of mainline kernel support is a bit
annoying, but that's being fixed with Linux 4.6 (which is getting S905
support).

The only other issue I've run into is lack of RTC being a bit more trouble
than I'd anticipated for some things. None of the stuff I'm building directly
has any hard dependencies on linear time, because it wouldn't be much of a
reliable or deterministic distributed system if it did ;-), but some
underlying facilities that I depend on don't take very kindly to having their
clocks reverted back in time on a regular basis.

Those minor foibles aside... these are exceptional SBC's and very, very
competitively priced. I'd probably donate a kidney for a proper SATA port on
them though. :-)

~~~
ChrisDutrow
Not sure if this is helpful, but you can get older, (but oddly still very
powerful) xeon servers on Ebay for under $200. That's what I use for
prototyping distributed systems. The advantage is the hardware architecture is
the same you would use in a production system. I think maybe a lot of
companies that maintain data centers are flooding the used market? For $250, I
was able to configure 64gb RAM Xeon servers that clock in a little over 1/4 of
the CPU speed of very high end brand new servers.

...not that I don't love Raspberry Pi, I considered using them, but prefer
something where I won't run into compatibility issues for prototyping (and
they have SATA ports).

~~~
osivertsson
Having five Xeon servers on your desk is not much fun when it comes to noise,
but if you have some sort of server area yeah I agree you can get some good
deals.

~~~
Tiksi
There's a ton of multi-node servers out there for dirt cheap. That way you
only need one noisy server on your desk, or you can hide it away somewhere.
I'm a fan of the c6100(ish) servers that have been getting offloaded on ebay
lately:

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-XS23-SC-Cloud-
Server-4-node-8x-...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-XS23-SC-Cloud-
Server-4-node-8x-QC-L5420-2-5Ghz-96GB-C6100-Style-/191834473161)

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-C6100-C6105-Cloud-
Server-6x-1-8...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-C6100-C6105-Cloud-
Server-6x-1-8GHz-2419-Hex-Core-48GB-RAM-3x-500GB-HDD/381299776313)

~~~
tlrobinson
Have you heard a C6100? I haven't, but have heard they're insanely loud.

~~~
ChrisDutrow
I think most server machines are probably pretty loud. They're designed to go
in data centers where noise is not a factor. They put a lot of components in a
somewhat small space, then they put passive heatsinks on the CPUs and blow air
through the whole case, including the passive heatsinks. The fans are really
loud because they are both small and powerful.

If you wanted, you could take the top off the case and then put bigger,
quieter fans in, or perhaps put larger, quieter active desktop heatsinks on
just the CPUs. I _think_ this would be okay, I don't think the rest of the
motherboards usually require the fans, but I could be wrong.

------
hyc_symas
He's going to have to revisit this when the Pine A64 ships. Also if you're
willing to step up to the $99 price level, you should check out the Geekbox.
RK3368 SOC, 8-core Cortex-A53 at 1.5GHz, 2GB RAM.
[http://www.geekbox.tv/](http://www.geekbox.tv/)

I've been porting some stuff to it lately, along with a Ugoos UT4 (same chip)
and my old Raspberry Pi.

I've also pre-ordered an AMD Opteron A1100 board.
[http://lenovator.com/product/103.html](http://lenovator.com/product/103.html)

Will be interesting to see how AMD's Cortex-A57 performs compared to these
other Cortex-A53s.

~~~
mmphosis
The pi are good enough for my purposes. Depending on what you want to do, at
the $99 price level I started looking at
[http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N3150DC-
ITX/](http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N3150DC-ITX/)

~~~
morganvachon
I had the N3700 version of that board, and as a base for building a Windows 10
machine, it was very nice for the price. But Linux support for the onboard
video was terrible, so I ultimately gave it to a friend who needed a Win10
media center PC. Once Intel starts officially supporting the
Braswell/CherryView GPU in Linux (and it might by now; I got rid of it before
the 4.4 kernel was released which supposedly supported it), it will make for
an excellent, quiet Linux workstation or special purpose board.

------
ryan-c
I bought an ODROID-C1 about a year ago. I was _very_ frustrated that it wasn't
supported in mainline Linux kernels - only a vendor kernel that was fairly far
behind, and didn't support what I had intended to use it for. I'm not sure
what the situation is now with that board or Hardkernel's newer boards.

~~~
Jasper_
S805 mainline is a long process, but it's ongoing and happening with Amlogic's
support and expertise.

See: [http://www.linux-meson.com/doku.php](http://www.linux-
meson.com/doku.php)

------
intrasight
I purchased an ODROID a couple years ago and got nowhere with it due to a lack
of support. They had like one developer and over-committed and under-
delivered. I'd never buy one again.

~~~
rcarmo
I've been running an ODROID-U2 for three years[1] now, and can't say I've had
any real problems - still running Ubuntu 14.04 wonderfully. What was the model
you got?

[1]:
[http://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2013/02/10/1230](http://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2013/02/10/1230)

~~~
intrasight
The one that stands out is the OpenCV library that never materialized. Another
was video drivers. Best approach is to be your own judge and go look at their
support forum.

------
ComputerGuru
Does anyone have a recommendation for a board that has 3-4x "native" SATA III?

The AMD Opteron A1100 does, but it's meant for data centers and the $350 price
point makes that clear.

~~~
im_down_w_otp
The Minnowboard Max's have a SATA port. I have two of those little guys
running as faux-HSM's. They're also excellent SBC's as long as you're willing
to cross over the ~$100 mark.

~~~
Nrsolis
I would love to hear more about this. I've been considering a similar use case
for a while and haven't found anything really comparable to what is available
commercially.

------
RachelF
Great performance improvements, but lacking much community and third party
support, unfortunately.

~~~
CalRobert
I try! I wrote about using one one what used to be my self-hosted Ghost blog.
I run Owncloud on it too and it works great.

Admittedly I haven't written much lately since I moved. My new ISP hasn't made
it as easy to self host.

------
sorenjan
How come there aren't any Intel Atom based single board computers at a similar
price point? These are basically phone or tablet class hardware, and if you go
to any of the chinese stores, like Ali express or Banggood, there's plenty of
cheap Atom tablets with Windows and Android dual boot. Wouldn't an x86 board
be much easier to use with Linux and all sorts of drivers?

~~~
imaginenore
Just get a mini-itx board on eBay or a board-cpu combo:

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Biostar-Mother-
Board-A68I-E350-DELUX...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Biostar-Mother-
Board-A68I-E350-DELUXE-Mini-ITX-CPU-Combo-Brand-New-Board-/262279282535)

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Optiplex-745-USFF-Ultra-
Small-F...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Optiplex-745-USFF-Ultra-Small-Form-
System-Board-Motherboard-PK096-CN-0PK096-/272153998996)

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-DH61AG-Desktop-Board-
DDR3-Thin...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-DH61AG-Desktop-Board-DDR3-Thin-
Mini-ITX-LGA1155-Refurbished-Board-Only-/182046976246)

And the CPUs are cheap too:

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Pentium-Dual-Core-
Processor-G6...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Pentium-Dual-Core-
Processor-G630-2-7-Ghz-3-MB-Cache-LGA-1155-/111947799803)

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/QTY-1x-INTEL-Celeron-
CPU-G550-2-6GHZ...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/QTY-1x-INTEL-Celeron-
CPU-G550-2-6GHZ-2MB-LGA1155-SR061-/131747970837)

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Pentium-G2030-3GHz-3M-Cache-
Du...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Pentium-G2030-3GHz-3M-Cache-Dual-Core-
CPU-Processor-LGA1155-/201545162114)

~~~
kogepathic
Or just buy an old laptop. I recently bought a Dell E6230 (3rd Gen Core i3)
from eBay for $90. Fully functional laptop including RAM, hard drive, keyboard
and LCD.

People often forget that the used laptop market exists. I use a Dell E6220 now
as my main laptop because it accepts 16GB DDR3 and lasts 6+ hours on a 6 cell
battery.

Sure, I would love to have a laptop with an HD or 4K screen, but for $100-200
I can buy the next previous generation each year and use the old one as a
server for projects.

They consume ~7W idle with the LCD on. I'm sure that would drop to 3-4W with
the screen off.

I used to have a MacBook (2011), but the thought of paying $1500-2000 for a
new laptop where I can't even upgrade the memory, WiFi, or storage (easily)
strikes me as insane.

~~~
tluyben2
I buy or get stacks of old laptops: sure the boards are bigger but full
featured and for experiments I do not really mind the size...

~~~
ChrisDutrow
Why old laptops instead of old desktops? Because of the power consumption?

~~~
kogepathic
Yes. I am not aware of any recent desktop computers that can idle at 3W and
provide close to the same peak performance as a used laptop does. Obviously
Intel has been making good progress on this, I have heard that Sky Lake chips
can idle at <10W, but those are still quite expensive.

Also by buying a used laptop you get something which is already designed for
low power use (e.g. 35W CPUs are pretty much the maximum) and has a built in
UPS. Even if the battery is worn out, you're still likely to get 30-60 minutes
of run time.

~~~
ChrisDutrow
Thanks for posting this!

The idling at 3w is a huge deal I think.

What do you use these for? Is there a way to add an extra NIC card? What
models do you find work best for this?

Edit: This might be a really dumb question, but might it be possible to put a
laptop CPU into a server motherboard? Not sure if the laptop i7's/i5's are LGA
2011 and if the motherboard architecture would be compatible? If this were the
case you could use the server board dual NIC and out of band management.

~~~
kogepathic
> What do you use these for?

VM hosts mostly. I bought a bunch of 8GB DDR3 SODIMMs for cheap.

> Is there a way to add an extra NIC card?

You can get ExpressCard gigabit NICs for a reasonable sum. I have also seen
dual gigabit mini PCIe cards available for around $50.

Me personally, I just use a managed switch which supports VLANs. None of the
VMs I run are really network heavy (except when booting from a Zyxel NAS I
turned into an iSCSI SAN), so having them share a 1GBit link isn't an issue.
VLANs ensure appropriate separation.

They're also great to replace the wireless card if you want to make a
professional grade WiFi AP. You can buy 802.11ac cards for around $80 which
work with Linux. So you end up with something far better than the ARM/MIPS
they sell on Amazon for the same price.

> What models do you find work best for this?

Any Intel NIC is usually very reliable. I also haven't had any problems with
RealTek cards.

> but might it be possible to put a laptop CPU into a server motherboard?

I believe this was possible with Mobile Pentium 4 chips. You could put them in
socket 478 with an adapter.

Nowadays though it's not possible. The architectures between desktop and
mobile are too different (e.g. QPI speed, # of memory channels)

> Not sure if the laptop i7's/i5's are LGA 2011 and if the motherboard
> architecture would be compatible?

They're not. The Dell E6220/6230 use a BGA mounted CPU, so it can't be
replaced.

LGA2011 CPUs are special beasts. I was considering to buy one earlier this
year because they're so cheap (compared to present day Xeons), but then you
basically have to buy an eATX motherboard, server grade PSU, etc.

You can just now buy an LGA2011-3 mini ITX board, but it's really not worth
it. LGA2011 CPUs are designed for multi-socket severs.

> If this were the case you could use the server board dual NIC and out of
> band management

As per above, you can't do this. OOB management takes power too, and I doubt
you could find a server board with these features that uses under 20W of power
itself.

These laptops do have Intel ME though. I think some kind of OOB management is
possible. I haven't tried myself though.

~~~
ChrisDutrow
Thanks for posting this. This will definitely help a huge amount with the
project I am working on (EnterpriseJazz.com)

What models of laptops do you looks for. I recently bought an employee a used
Lenovo T410. Is that a decent model, or are there other models of laptop that
work better?

------
jandrese
Is there support for hardware video decoding on the ODROID? The Pi almost
makes for a reasonable media center thanks to the hardware decoding, but I
would like something with a little more oomph for the selection screen. This
looks like it should be great for that, but I don't want something that's
going to fall on its face when you try to decode video.

~~~
mwcampbell
Kind of sad that a selection screen needs any oomph.

~~~
morganvachon
I've got a Pi Zero, Pi B+, Pi 2, and Pi 3, and the Pi 3 is the only one that
has virtually zero lag on the "selection screen" for Kodi and OpenElec. The Pi
2's lag is barely noticeable, but the BCM2835 in the B+ and Zero does lag
significantly (though playback is flawless on all of them).

That said, none of the Pis come close to a commercial set top box like the
Roku 3 or Nvidia Shield TV, both of which are 60fps and buttery smooth.

------
jan0e
I would like to use the ODROID C2 as a media player. The video and network
capabilities are looking quite promising. I can't find much about the
supported audio modes. Does anyone know if audio passthrough via HDMI is
supported? Does the platform even need to support it or is it just a software
thing and Kodi can do it anyway?

------
panosv
Networking comparison of RPi B+, RPi 2, RPi 3, Odroic C1+, Banana Pi, and
Utilite Standard: [https://netbeez.net/2016/03/17/raspberry-
pi-3-iperf/](https://netbeez.net/2016/03/17/raspberry-pi-3-iperf/)

------
mhb
Are there any relatively cheap cameras with global shutters that work with
these boards?

------
crudbug
Any Hardkernel folks here ? I want to know how much cost saving can be
achieved for a barebone C3 with only 1G NIC & may be USB 3 , having this
version will be good for making clusters.

$20 would be very good number.

~~~
k3d3
I think they'd have to use a different base board - the C2 uses an Amlogic
S905, which as far as I know doesn't support USB3.

------
mp3geek
Are there any opensource boards (similar to the Pi's), that have 2 (Gig)
Ethernet ports?

~~~
davidovitch
Not exactly like the Pi's, and coming in with 5 Gig Ethernet ports is the
Turris Omnia: [https://omnia.turris.cz/en/](https://omnia.turris.cz/en/). It
is intended to be a router, and not really a Pi clone though. However, it is
(almost) completely open. You can order the board only for $119, but that
option will disappear soon if I got it right.

~~~
ZenoArrow
The Turris Omnia looks amazing! It's got everything I'd want in a home router.
Do you know why it's due to be discontinued?

~~~
davidovitch
I participated in the crowd funding phase (waiting for my router to arrive
later this year), and they have just updated their IndieGogo project page:
[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/turris-omnia-hi-
performan...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/turris-omnia-hi-performance-
open-source-router#/updates) saying:

    
    
      At the same time, we will discontinue the "Board only"
      perk. The demand for this version was very low and it
      presents a complication for handling and logistics.
    

Just to be clear, it is the board-only option that is being discontinued, not
the router+case! The case looks pretty cool to me.

------
xedarius
I've owned a XU4 for over a year now. It's been a great piece of kit (once I
disabled the fan that is). For me the biggest advantage over the Pi is the
extra memory. Especially if you plan to develop any sort of Java services.

