
Odroid-C4 - doener
https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-c4/
======
ac29
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955077)

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tryptophan
The biggest reason to buy the raspi is the software support for the hardware.
With lots of these competitor boards, you may get better hardware, but it will
be forever stuck on debian of ages long past.

Until I am sure that software support for these other boards is good, I will
forever stick to raspi.

~~~
sfreitag
According to hardkernel.com the Odroid-C4 runs Ubuntu 20.04 + Kernel 5.4

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SlowRobotAhead
Is that “runs” or is 100% without workarounds?

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Fronzie
In the past, their Odroid X2 ran fine, but did have a lot of custom patches in
the kernel. This made it hard to update to newer kernel version.

If I remember correctly, the binary blobs for the graphics driver (Mali) were
also hard to get for newer kernel versions.

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metroholografix
I have 4 ARM Odroid devices, but I'm not going to buy another one. Even though
some are advertised as supporting mainline Linux kernels, in practice none do
if reliable operation is to be expected.

When you buy an ARM Odroid device, you're tied to Hardkernel's vendor-specific
patches and vendor-specific Linux kernel branches. As you would expect, the
quality of these patches varies from bad to absolutely terrible. If you visit
the Hardkernel forums, you'll see people casually swapping patches to get
functionality like USB to "work".

The practice of not even trying to merge with mainline is completely
unacceptable, and not only leads to fragmentation but erodes any quality
guarantees one can make about systems one builds on top of their products.
They're literally running code that the mainstream Linux kernel development
community has neither vetoed nor reviewed. It's for that very reason that I
will not support them anymore. The ARM Linux ecosystem is bad enough without
me subsidizing this sort of behavior.

It's also disappointing to see the Linux kernel community not coming down hard
on such endeavors (Linus in particular could enforce the Linux trademark)
since they dilute the entire ecosystem and erode quality. Odroid advertises
Linux but it's not really running Linux.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
Not entirely true. The process is not automagic, because you manually have to
search bits from the device tree and put them into the one from mainline
kernel. Furthermore fiddling with uboot is often needed. But it's absolutely
possible to have rock solid operation with mainline linux. It just lacks the
(right) vendor defaults in all sorts of places for now. This is my experience
with Allwinner. But since i'm watching that SBC ghetto closely i'm aware of
that being the case for the other vendors too, more or less. And when
everything is _perfect_ the device is obsolete, EOL.

 _G_

(edit: reminds me of fiddling with custom ACPI tables because of crappy BIOS
on PCs)

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jbverschoor
So it's $5 less expensive, but it's slower, doesn't offer cheaper versions or
other configurations.

Please remind me why I'd ever go for this one?

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adrian_b
Which of Raspberry Pi 4 or ODROID-C4 is preferable, depends on the
application. Neither of them is better for all applications.

If the power consumption matters, then ODROID-C4 is better. If the performance
of the non-volatile memory is a limitation, then ODROID-C4 is much faster. If
the speed of DRAM is a limitation, then ODROID-C4 is faster. If the
application requires sustained performance with all cores active, then
ODROID-C4 is faster, unless a custom cooler is used with RPI 4, which must be
either very noisy or very large (larger than the board).

~~~
adrian_b
To be more clear, the list of of advantages mentioned above make ODROID-C4 a
better choice for any server-like application, while Raspberry Pi 4 is
probably better for a personal-computer-like application. I do not use a
credit-card-sized computer as a PC instead of my laptop, but I use such
computers in server-like applications, so for my uses, ODROID-C4 is better.

After you add all the required accessories, the prices fror RPI 4 and for
ODROID-C4 are very similar, for both of them you would reach around $100 for a
decent system, but the ODROID shop is somewhat more convenient because you can
buy from a single place almost any accessory you might need besides the basic
board.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
Needs machined aluminum case where bits of case reach down to the surface of
the chips with just a small thermal interface pad or thermal grease between
them. I don't like plastic with air vents, and fans.

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hinkley
I like my Pi clones, especially since before the 4 the rasPi lacked in areas
that mattered to me.

But looking at these charts I see they omitted devices on some tests,
especially toward the bottom. And herein lies the case study for the rest of
us.

As a skeptical consumer of infographics, I smell a rat when the charts don’t
line up. And it doesn’t matter if they still win on those benchmarks, what
matters is the omission, which looks like you’re trying to hide something.
Since I don’t work with these people, and can’t just go ask what happened, the
safe bet is to assume the worst.

Publish data for all competitors on all benchmarks or people will assume you
are lying.

That said, they avoided the most common sin: in all charts where magnitude
matters, they use a zero origin for the charts, so there is no distortion of
relative value between options. They only chopped for graphs where steady
state is the point (like thermals and frequency).

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tomc1985
My friend and I have messed around with these. He is a big fan of them, I'm
more lukewarm. One of my complaints was that the OS and driver support always
had something wrong out-of-the-box. Tried with the provided Ubuntu image, also
with Odrobian (its a debian build for odroid), always some random problem. 2D
video acceleration worked but 3d didn't, or maybe 2D drawing was busted but
Kodi would run at 60fps. Maybe the audio worked, maybe it didn't. It was
almost always fixable with enough time and effort but eventually I gave up on
them.

Also build quality is a bit suspect, we've each had one or two of these things
die on us.

Ended up replacing it with an Nvidia Shield.

On the upside, they're cheap and the metal case you can get for them is pretty
cool. They don't run too hot and they're reasonably fast. For a while they
were the only option with USB3

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m-p-3
More like an alternative than a clone. You can't take the MicroSD card with a
RasPi OS and make a drop-in replacement as if it was the same components and
expect everything to work.

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ohelabs
Neat... While Odroid has been around for a little bit offering an alternative
to RPi the issue is always support and adoption. A lot projects are built on
RPi and porting them over to other platforms while sometimes easy other times
adds another layer of abstraction and random issues.

the other problem is if I need more Processing power I just move to an x86
platform... if I can't run it on a low power board.

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samfisher83
Its not really a clone its a different single board computer. A72 on pi4 is
more powerful than the a55 on c4. GPU might be better on c4.

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adrian_b
Cortex-A72 is faster than Cortex-A55, but only when it is well cooled, which
will never happen on a credit-card-sized computer, unless you use either a
noisy fan or a passive heatsink larger than the board.

ODROID-C4, as delivered, with only a small passive heatsink, can run
indefinitely with all cores at 2 GHz, without overheating.

Therefore a Raspberry Pi 4 without improved cooling will be in many cases
slower, due to throttling, despite the larger Cortex-A72 cores.

Moreover, Cortex-A72 implements an obsolete instruction set, while Cortex-A55
implements the ARMv8.2-A instruction set, which for certain applications, e.g.
for the synchronization of multiple threads (i.e. for atomic instructions),
has significant improvements.

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ex3ndr
I didn't get. Why anyone claim that this board is cheaper while RPI 4 2GB cost
35 bucks and have much much better CPU? 4GB doesn't make sense and almost
always is an overkill.

I made a huge research trying to find cheap and powerful board for my
prototypes. And RPI always wins in the price. Even Chinese clones are more
expensive.

Why? It turns out RPI is a non profit.

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rasz
You know what else cost $50? 5x faster 2 year old laptop with cracked screen.

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dang
We changed the title from "Odroid-C4 for 50 Dollar (Raspberry 4 clone)" since
there were complaints about that being inaccurate.

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deagle50
CoreELEC with 4k HDR and audio passthrough. This may be the new Kodi box.

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Koshkin
CoreELEC on an N2 works extremely well, I expect this one to be no different.

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tra3
Is this an exact clone? Why is it cheaper than a rpi?

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duskwuff
No. It's a similar form factor and uses a compatible GPIO pinout, but the
hardware is completely different -- the Raspberry Pi uses a Broadcom SoC; the
Odroid-C4 uses an Amlogic part.

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Koshkin
"Completely" is a bit of an overstatement, CPU arch is the same.

~~~
duskwuff
Barely. The Broadcom BCM283x family is pretty weird -- it uses a programmable
GPU which is (among other things) in charge of the early boot process. The
Amlogic part is a much more conventional design.

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pizza234
This is not a clone.

The C4 is based on the Cortex A55 (A5x models are typically the low-
performance/power Cortex models), while the Pi 4 is based on the Cortex A72
(A7x are the high-performance/power ones).

~~~
artonge
Their CPU benchmarks indicates better performance for the C4 compared to the
RPI4 though. Is it due to the A55 being more recent ?

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adrian_b
The better performance is due mainly to faster flash memory (eMMC), faster
DRAM memory and bad standard cooling on RPI4.

For benchmarks that depend only on the CPU, using an improved cooler on RPI4
would increase the sustained performance above Cortex-A55, except for some
custom programs that could be written to take advantage of the newer extra
instructions available on Cortex-A55.

~~~
adrian_b
I want to add that for a fanless credit-card-sized computer, a quadruple
Cortex-A55 is the correct CPU choice.

A quadruple smartphone core like the obsolete Cortex-A72 or any of its
successors, Cortex-A75, Cortex-A76 and Cortex-A77, requires a smartphone-sized
board, unless you use a noisy fan for cooling.

There exists also the fanless ODROID-N2, with a quadruple Cortex-A73, which,
being well designed, has a larger board, which has an area similar to a
smartphone or NUC.

The RPI4 has a too large CPU for its size, unless fan noise is considered
acceptable.

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kova12
There is like 20 pages of reading, yet no mentioning how much RAM is in this
thing...

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KAdot
You can find full hardware specifications at
[https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-c4/hardware/hardware](https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-c4/hardware/hardware)

