Hardkernel Launches $35 Development Board That Can Smash The RPi

[dh04000]

It is good to see gigabit ethernet, but I wish it had at least one USB 3.0 port too.

They have the XU3-Lite and XU3 with USB3.0 ports. The XU3-lite is only $99.

[dh04000]

This.

If there is no HW GPU acceleration then it really doesnt smash anything at all...

Did you watch the video? There is HW GPU acceleration.

[Ardje]

Better Performance-Per-Watt does not solve the higher power consumption problem.
THIS is spec hunting
5$ the year just for a single RaPi are not nothing

Usually hardkernel is very good in making power efficient hardware.
As far as I know the U3 can have a lower power use than a PI (as long as you keep the frequencies low too).
But if you want power efficient hardware you should use the odroid W, the Pi-compatible-stripped-from-everything board.
OTOH, a U3 can be 10 times as fast as a PI (with 2GB memory), though it will consume 7W when going full performance.
As performance per watt goes, a U3 is a lot faster than a D525 and more than 4 times as fast as a AMD G-T44R, still with
a power usage that is lower than the total chipsets needed to support the D525 or the G-T44R.
But to be clear: you don't have to run the U3 at 1.7GHz. You don't have to have power on the HDMI connector, or the USB.
This would allow it to spend less than $5 a year on energy for a U3, and still be faster.

I assume the C1 will even use less power, at the cost of being less powerful CPU wise.

[nomadewolf]

Don't see the HDMI port, but that's ok.
Too bad i got my RPi B+ just a few weeks ago

[Viper_Scull]

Don't see the HDMI port, but that's ok.
Too bad i got my RPi B+ just a few weeks ago

It's got micro HDMI.

[madjr]

Question:

can a RasPi or this type of board be used in with a cheap POWER BANK instead of a normal / bulky UPS for preventing sudden power off in case of power outages ?

[V10lator]

If these numbers are true...


(Source: http://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-c1 )

[schmidtbag]

Question:

can a RasPi or this type of board be used in with a cheap POWER BANK instead of a normal / bulky UPS for preventing sudden power off in case of power outages ?

I don't see why not. Neither board takes much power to operate and you could potentially run them off of 3 AA batteries if you don't plug any USB devices in.


@TAXI:
People give the Pi WAAAY too much credit, so yes, those numbers probably are accurate. The Pi is a crap computer (even for the price) and has been since its release date - the only reason people like it is because it's small, cheap, and power efficient. But there have been other platforms that can outperform it, are physically much smaller, have many more GPIO pins, and are roughly the same price (including shipping). To me, the greatest selling point of the Pi is it's amount of support it has, but, it only has that support due to its unwarranted (in my opinion) popularity. If platforms like the C1 got the same popularity, it would have as good of (maybe better) support.

It's not that I dislike the Pi, but people use it as a "control" group to compare against, and I find that pretty stupid considering there are really great products out there that deserve more recognition and would result in happier users. On top of that, people bought the Pi expecting it to act as a full-blown PC or media center. It's purpose was non-profit education for places that can't afford a computer lab, and people were whining that it doesn't let them write their thesis or play their 1080p 60FPS movies.

Nothing against you - I'm just ranting.

[blackshard]

I don't see why not. Neither board takes much power to operate and you could potentially run them off of 3 AA batteries if you don't plug any USB devices in.


@TAXI:
People give the Pi WAAAY too much credit, so yes, those numbers probably are accurate. The Pi is a crap computer (even for the price) and has been since its release date - the only reason people like it is because it's small, cheap, and power efficient. But there have been other platforms that can outperform it, are physically much smaller, have many more GPIO pins, and are roughly the same price (including shipping). To me, the greatest selling point of the Pi is it's amount of support it has, but, it only has that support due to its unwarranted (in my opinion) popularity. If platforms like the C1 got the same popularity, it would have as good of (maybe better) support.

It's not that I dislike the Pi, but people use it as a "control" group to compare against, and I find that pretty stupid considering there are really great products out there that deserve more recognition and would result in happier users. On top of that, people bought the Pi expecting it to act as a full-blown PC or media center. It's purpose was non-profit education for places that can't afford a computer lab, and people were whining that it doesn't let them write their thesis or play their 1080p 60FPS movies.

Nothing against you - I'm just ranting.

In my opinion, one of the most interesting things is the community and the efforts to document the features of the hardware.
No boards and SoCs have documentation like RPi, now even drivers are open source. If you want to do something serious with the hardware, you must know it. Most cheap boards sports chinese chips (rockchip, allwinner)... they can run Linux, but barely gets any support, which means buggy drivers will stay buggy, inaccessibile features will stay inaccessible, and so on...

Consider the case of Allwinner A10/A20 chips (lots of OLinuXino boards): these chips have hardware encoding and decoding for h.264 codec, but the proprietary drivers don't offer standard OpenMAX components and open source efforts are based on reverse engineering the chip, since the documentation is lacking.

Most of the neat things are developed because there are resources (documentation, SoC engineers of the chip maker, community) developers can exploit.

I know AmLogic is much more linux friendly than chinese makers, and I hope this board will become a serious contender for RPi because it has all the chances to do it right.

[vadix]

Spec hunting is for kiddies.
The real question is: How much more power does it consume?
As long as it needs more power (which is more than likely) this board cannot smash anything.

Since this is not only using a quad core (so it can do the same when threading while throttled down), but also running on better fabrication technology, less power will be required to do the same workload. This also has hardware floating point, so again the power consumption of the Pi is smashed there as well. I assume it takes more power at max load, but that is a pointless comparison compared to the energy consumption for the same load.

Any application would be better suited for this. It has an amazing ARM core with good graphics, fast memory, gigabit ethernet, etc. I am so getting one of these.

And just to push the point further, it turns out that the PI consumes more power:

From the PI FAQ: "Typically, the model B uses between 700-1000mA depending on what peripherals are connected"

From hardkernel.com: "The ODROID-C1 consumes less than 0.5A in most cases, but it can climb to 2A if many passive USB peripherals are attached directly to the main board."

Both are running at 5V.