For A Few Dollars More Than The Raspberry Pi 3 You Can Have A Much Faster Board

Yesterday's Raspberry Pi 3 Benchmarks vs. Eight Other ARM Linux Boards was quite interesting while today I have a complementary data point: the Raspberry Pi 3 compared to the ODROID-C2. The ODROID-C2 costs just a few dollars more ($40 USD) while having a faster SoC and other advantages.

The ODROID-C2 is a 64-bit quad-core SBC powered by the Amlogic S905 with four Cortex-A53 cores at 2GHz. The ODROID-C2 has a Mali 450 GPU and 2GB of DDR3 SDRAM, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI 2.0, and officially supports Ubuntu and Android. The ODROID-C2 will begin shipping this month for $40 USD.

For just $5 USD more than the Raspberry Pi 3, the SoC is faster with its A53 cores running at 2GHz rather than 1.2GHz. The RPi3 does have the open-source VC4 graphics driver stack with mainline support for the VideoCore IV graphics while sadly the Mali 450 is backed by a closed-source blob with not much happening these days for the Lima community driver project. Also in favor of the ODROID-C2 is 2GB of DDR3 memory where as the Raspberry Pi 3 has 1GB of LPDDR2 memory. The ODROID-C2 also has HDMI 2.0 and superior Ethernet while the Raspberry Pi 3 has an advantage of 802.11n WiFi. The ODROID-C2 also has a heatsink for ensuring the SoC doesn't get as toasty as the Raspberry Pi 3.

While the ODROID-C2 doesn't appear to be shipping in quantities yet and Hardkernel hasn't offered to send over any sample, thanks to the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org being the de facto platform for carrying out open-source/Linux benchmarks, there's been ODROID-C2 benchmarks available for almost one month.

Thus it was easy to conduct a side-by-side performance comparison of the ODROID-C2 to the Raspberry Pi 3 with the available benchmarks. Here are some performance figures for those looking towards a low-cost ARM 64-bit SBC.