Submitted by The Hardkernel ODROID-C1 features an Amlogic S805 SoC that features a 1.5GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A5 processor and Mali 450MP2 graphics. This board also has 1GB of DDDR3 memory, Gigabit Ethernet, 40 GPIO pins, eMMC / microSD storage, four USB 2.0 ports, and one USB OTG port. While coming in close to the size and price, the specs of the ODROID-C1 are far superior to the Raspberry Pi with a better SoC, double the RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, and an extra USB port.
I’ve always wanted something like this to run Android with a mouse and keyboard. Why? Well, why not? Seems like it could be fun.
Looks good and I might get one. The article is titled “Hardkernel Launches $35 Development Board That Can Smash The RPi” which demonstrates a misunderstanding about the Pi. There have always been boards with better specs; the Pi is about having something of a standard for ideas to be shared and taught. Is that something we should aim to “smash”?
The idea is the Pi’s specs are “smashed”, not the Raspberry community or philosophy.
…or, more specifically, that it smashes the Pi’s specs at the same price point.
What do you expect from [kinda] green board? hulk smash!!!!
I’ve been wanting to control various things from the network, it’s about time I got one of these to try. Ideally it’d run debian as my OS of choice.
There are several single board computers on the market but with these features and this price, this looks like it could be a winner!
Also, I like the osnews article topics as of late, keep it up
It seems to me that this is a “golden age” of SoC development boards. There is enough variety to keep the prices falling, and the systems are powerful enough to get real jobs done.
I’m a little worried that ARM is too dominant, but there are still alternatives (MIPS, x86, etc.).
All in all, it’s a good time to be a hobbyist. Those of you with enough time for hobbies, make sure you enjoy it! ;^)
Yup, right :
http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr/mips-creator-ci20-development-board-…
Annnnnd… it’s close sourced. Thanks Imgtech !
ARM took over and became dominant because of smartphones, tablets, smart watches and other “smart things”.
MIPS didn’t have much succeess with that. Neither Intel which is a giant, had.
I’ll also like to see more platforms, CPUs and SOCs and play with some MIPS, PowerPC, Sparc devices.
twitterfire,
Agreed. The problem is that the adoption of architectures is as much a popularity contest as it is one of technical merit. If it were somehow possible to have devices compete in a bubble independently from corporate money & politics, I am confident that we would see a lot of innovative alternative choices come out as viable options.
I even think this popularity contest holds back innovation from the likes of intel and arm designers who put their resources and best engineers towards reinforcing their existing market winners.
With enough variation, evolution tends to improve things over time, but with insufficient variation it can lead to a sort of “local maxima”. Going further might not be possible without backing out of the local maximum first.
Edited 2014-12-13 00:26 UTC
It is a pity, again a nice board but not for bare metal or RTOS: A SoC for which no open documentation is availablen and a board without JTAG. How much would it cost to add a row of solder pads for a debug connection?
Also, the 1st level bootloader is closed source.
Would have been a nice board …
DeepThought,
Are any single board ARM computers 100% open? I’d really like to know. I’ve read that even the RPI needs binary blobs.
Yup, GPU driver.
Not the GPU driver – the GPU firmware. (Which is also responsible for loading the firmware for the ARM bit of the SOC)
Yes, it does more than most graphics firmwares do. No, that doesn’t make it a driver.
(The driver is very thin but that bit is open source and people can (and have) written third party operating systems for the Pi that use the video output)
It’d be *nice* to see it open sourced – and it may happen – but then again, it may not happen.
Oh – and as an aside, the ODROID has Mali for the graphics. There is an open source driver – but I don’t know if it supports the chip on the ODROID yet – probably not
It’d be nice if ARM gave a bit more to the project, though… (But I can’t see that happening)
Edited 2014-12-16 13:08 UTC
Yep, as Kochise stated, nearly all of this SoC have closed GPU drivers. And even if you get public documents, the GPU registers are not described.
I wonder, do they really think that a competitor would not just use a decent disassembler if he was interested in the GPU’s functionality?
But there are companies like Nvidia which even do not provide open documentation.
It is just frustrating …
Strangely, AMD (ex-ATI) do provide some good tech docs about fairly recent Radeon chips. Yet no “proof-of-concept” video driver source code.
nVidia has sparkled Nouveau, the 3D support through Gallium is gaining momentum.
We use a pretty nice Sitara board from myirtech. BTW the only one I found with 1GB Ethernet _and_ possibility to use JTAG.
BeagleBones?
Nope, PowerVR GPU, closed source. The best you can find, fully open, is boards based on Samsung S3Cxxxx’s serie (S3C2410, S3C2440, S3C6410, …)
Look for the OK6410-B on Aliexpress, pretty expensive board for a 566 MHz CPU with only 256 MB RAM, but these are fully open, even the FIMG GPU driver with OpenGLES 2 support is available on XDA.
I’m surprised nobody has posted about getting one to try as an htpc/media player.