Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer for $59

Re:Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer f... by roeme on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @10:20AM (#7634096)

All these tiny board SoC's are fine and dandy, but as long as they do not have a better I/O (i.e. more bandwidth, read gigabit ethernet speeds) than the RPi; there's no real advantage IMO.

  * You can already output HD with the RPi
  * You can use (some) codecs at an useful speed (no need for more GHz)
  * It's cheap
  * It uses almost no power
  * You have useful (physical) IO
  * (fill in what you like about the RPi)

So what does that leave with the alternatives? More RAM and more processing power. But of what use is it, when you're still limited how fast you can bring data you want to crunch on in and out of the system only at a slow pace?

And if you need a lot of processing power but have only little data; I'm tempted to say that such a small system is the wrong choice anyway.

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Re:Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer f... by jolan on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @10:47AM (#7634251)

Well if you're running something that requires any sort of crypto, i.e. a bitcoin node, then the RPi's slow CPU is very detrimental.

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Re:Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer f... by roeme on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @10:56AM (#7634306)

But the same limitation applies to the contenders, doesn't it? As they're not _that_ much more powerful to make a real difference in this case, or am I wrong?

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Re:Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer f... by Nursie on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @11:53AM (#7634769)

Err, no. The differences are pretty massive. The Samsung and Qualcomm processor cores are not only much, much faster but more sophisticated too. The Pi is very basic.

The Pi was also not the first of these boards, merely one that had great marketing and an appealing price point. My sheevaplug predates it by a couple of years (and is still faster)

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Re:Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer f... by vardump on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @06:12PM (#7637267)

The problem is not that RPi doesn't have the horsepower. It does - but you've got to use Videocore IV. Hopefully there'll be some good compiler with at least intrinsic support for it.

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Re:Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer f... by clarry on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @11:12AM (#7634424)

Actually the difference between the RPi's CPU and the CPUs on beefier ARM boards is quite staggering.

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Re:Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer f... by ZenoArrow on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @10:36AM (#7634177)

What baffles me is there is a simple to understand addition to these RPi competitors that would make them very useful for a number of key applications, that nearly always seems to be missing, namely... a SATA connector. It would be really handy for both NAS boxes and media centres.

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Re:Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer f... by zepolud on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @10:49AM (#7634262)

You should check Olinuxino Lime[1] if you're looking for SATA connectivity. It costs 30 EUR and is open source hardware.

[1] https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A10/A10-OLinuXino-...

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Re:Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer f... by rwmj on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @11:17AM (#7634469)

Cubietruck -- dual core, quite fast, fairly open, supports hardware virtualization. It has a true SATA port (note that many ARM systems have faked SATA via USB which can be slow).

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Re:Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer f... by roeme on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @10:58AM (#7634316)

For me, as long as the IOPS as mentioned in my parent post aren't available, I can just as well connect the Disks through USB. shrugs

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Re:Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer f... by Bluerise on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @01:42PM (#7635560)

Have a look at i.MX6 based machines. Namely CuBox-i, HummingBoard, SABRE Lite and Wandboard. The Utilite is fine, too.

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Re:Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer f... by justincormack on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @10:46AM (#7634243)

There are quite a few with SATA but you have to hunt around. Eg the Cubox does.

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Re:Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer f... by vardump on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @06:14PM (#7637276)

Rather with a PCIe connector.

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Re:Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer f... by icebraining on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @10:35AM (#7634166)

The HummingBoard will have Gigabit ethernet; no word on price yet, though: http://hackaday.com/2014/04/22/hummingboard-the-vastly-more-...

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Re:Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer f... by janinge on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @01:50PM (#7635622)

> The HummingBoard uses a Freescale i.MX6 quad core...

Current i.MX 6 silicon aren't able squeeze out more than 470 Mbps from their Ethernet MAC.

http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/errata/IMX6DQCE.p...

ERR004512

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Re:Odroid-U3: A quad-core 1.7GHz ARM single-board computer f... by clarry on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @10:58AM (#7634323)

My desktop (really a netbook) has gigabit ethernet but it's not connected when the slower wireless works just fine. My ADSL is slower still so it just doesn't matter.

So should I swap it for an RPi? For what use is all the processing power I have.

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