
ODROID-C1 – Quad Core ARM Linux computer - joshbaptiste
http://hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php
======
biggerfisch
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...](http://hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G141628557245)

~~~
monocasa
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.

~~~
kragen
Most SD and μSD cards have embedded microcontrollers
[http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554](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?

~~~
monocasa
Yeah, it was almost certainly firmware bugs combined with already marginal
NANDs. ie. the NANDs probably would have been fine if they were babysat a
little better, but they were probably bottom of the barrel. That's kind of the
SD card market in a nut shell any way.

That being said we tried many different SD cards from quality vendors and
found pretty heavy bugs and performance related issues among all of the non
"industrial" versions.

So, yes, the problems don't have to be intrinsic to the form factor, but
empirically you're more likely than not to have issues with them.

------
hardwaresofton
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...](http://magazine.odroid.com/assets/201412/pdf/ODROID-
Magazine-201412.pdf) (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.

------
0x0
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.

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

~~~
pjc50
Correct. But this is just the first stage bootloader; the GPU boot ROM loads a
second stage loader from the SD card, which then loads the kernel and launches
the ARM straight into it. None of this is encrypted or signed as is usual on
Android devices.

[http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/10489/how-
doe...](http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/10489/how-does-
raspberry-pi-boot)

~~~
makomk
The license conditions do, however, forbid you from using the first-stage
bootloader on anything other a Raspberry Pi. That is, if you somehow manage to
get hold of another board with the same Broadcom SoC that's somehow compatible
with the bootloader, you're not allowed to boot that with it.

------
mikecarlton
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](http://www.pcengines.ch/alix2d3.htm))
with something like this.

~~~
ccwu660601
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...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X9RrbkUpiTQ-S6Acken-5fv7yYq2DTr_1zOjf6zabn0/edit?usp=sharing)

~~~
joshbaptiste
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.

~~~
narrowrail
Not sure what your budget (power or $) is, but I use this for an almost
identical situation:

AMD fanless barbone w/ dual NIC (Jetway $215)
[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856107...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856107110)

SSD 64GB ($62 sandisk)
[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA4UB22Z51...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA4UB22Z5185)

4GB RAM (no ECC) ($38 gskill)
[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231265)

So, $315 and ~15W max. I bet this could serve a small office well. Someone
should get this down to $200 with minimal specs (and no video or audio).

It has dual Realtek NICs; it runs pfsense and openVPN well, and you can also
run squid and snort if you're into it (I haven't learned how to use them yet,
but I plan to).

------
Ecio78
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/](http://www.solid-run.com/products/cubox-i-mini-computer/) [2]
[http://www.solid-run.com/cuboxtv/](http://www.solid-run.com/cuboxtv/)

------
PythonicAlpha
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??

~~~
carlhu
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.

~~~
papaf
Have you tried the pepper flash player?

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

------
kragen
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...](http://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/VideoCoreIV-
AG100-R.pdf), with an FFT example included in the standard distro
[https://github.com/raspberrypi/userland/blob/master/host_app...](https://github.com/raspberrypi/userland/blob/master/host_applications/linux/apps/hello_pi/hello_fft/gpu_fft.txt),
resulting in porting the Deep Belief image-recognition SDK to that GPU
[http://www.raspberrypi.org/more-qpu-magic-from-pete-
warden/](http://www.raspberrypi.org/more-qpu-magic-from-pete-warden/) and
SHA-256 [http://rpiplayground.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/hacking-the-
gp...](http://rpiplayground.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/hacking-the-gpu-for-fun-
and-profit-pt-1/)

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/](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;](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...](https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/operating_systems_open_arm_gpu/),
and while ARM has a lot of development documentation on their Mali site
[http://malideveloper.arm.com/develop-for-mali/sample-
code/](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
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](http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=3214)

~~~
kragen
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.

------
imrehg
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.

------
aseidl
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](http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=7479#p58825)

------
nglinh2312
How does it perform for Computer Vision/ Image Processing tasks? Couldn't find
anything mentioning openCL or anything of the sort

~~~
jws
No OpenCL for Mali 450.

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

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

~~~
0x0
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.

~~~
skrause
The native AES encryption instruction set on AArch64 might also be really
useful if you do any kind of encryption.

------
ilaksh
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
This might be what you're looking for:
[http://hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G14...](http://hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G140383714860)

~~~
ilaksh
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-...](http://www.buydisplay.com/default/7-hdmi-lcd-module-display-
touchscreen-vga-video-driver-board)

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

~~~
jszymborski
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.

~~~
rcarmo
I'm thinking of upgrading my Pi cluster ([http://github.com/rcarmo/raspi-
cluster](http://github.com/rcarmo/raspi-cluster)) to a set of these boards.
Mostly waiting for some benchmarks to come in and the holiday season to go
away...

~~~
ris
Why? The point of your "cluster" is clearly not performance.

~~~
walshemj
Its a cheap way of running a home lab to experiment with clusters

------
throwawayaway
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...](http://linuxgizmos.com/35-dollar-quad-core-hacker-sbc-offers-rpi-
like-expansion/)

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

~~~
morganvachon
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.

------
agumonkey
Curious about the power consumption.

~~~
PythonicAlpha
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
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.

~~~
PythonicAlpha
Yes, the higher performance is rather appealing. Of course one of the reasons
for the success of the raspberries is the low energy consumption, but
sometimes it is just to slow. A little reserve really would be good for media
centers or also if you want to have a small server solution.

Of course best would be some device with low power consumption when less work
is to do and which can go to full power if needed. Multiple cores would be
good for that, if the device could deactivate unneeded cores or even reduce
the clock speed.

I am looking forward for more power saving devices, since servers which run
all the day should consume less than today.

~~~
agumonkey
There might be opportunity for lower energy, speculating if the SoC has better
dynamic power abilities, and even without it, can finish it's work earlier and
go back to deep sleep longer.

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

------
nglinh2312
has anyone tried running openCV on this thing?

