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

[bug77]

All this ARM stuff does barely make any sense - as long as periphery options are still limited and especially until the GPU problem is solved. The ARM arch itself maybe a nice RISC design, and suitable for a lot of low power things, but the GPU driver situation is still horrible and a lot of boards offer rather limited connections.

Tru dat. If you have to go this route, you pretty much have to make a list of compromises each board requires and then see which of them affects you the least. But can you really complain at these prices?

[Kendji]

I'm considering upgrading my home network to Gigabit standard, I run an Odroid C1 as an home server running 'cloud services' for me. The problem is that the C1 has only one 100Mb ethernet port. I'm considering the C2 vs XU4, wondering if the price difference justifies the potential performance gains. Anyone with a similar problem?

[faldzip]

Unfortunately no Vulkan for both of them (I mean RPi3 and C2).

I'm considering the C2 vs XU4

XU4 has a newer Mali GPU with OpenCL and Vulkan support.

[zman0900]

I wonder how performance would compare if the odroid board was also running a 32 bit kernel like the RPi...

[Adarion]

Tru dat. If you have to go this route, you pretty much have to make a list of compromises each board requires and then see which of them affects you the least. But can you really complain at these prices?

Yes, to a certain extent I allow myself to complain.
Yes, some of these boards are very cheap. But so are some "full grown" MiniITX x86 boards (e.g. Kabini, AM1 + an APU). And there you don't have these problems.
Furthermore, I even could've bought some thin clients from ebay for cheap (1 to 5 Euros + postage) - but I refrained since it was e.g. some Marvell ARM (Marvell = not okay) with some XGI (sic!) chips combined. Now that would have been... I don't know. Could one even run a VESA driver on this thing? So it would be more a paperweight or electronic special waste - and I won't spend even a singe Dollar or Euro for a paperweight.
Once the driver situation is straightened one could actually put these little things to good use, puropse according to the availability of interfaces on these non-extendable boards.

[willmore]

I'm considering upgrading my home network to Gigabit standard, I run an Odroid C1 as an home server running 'cloud services' for me. The problem is that the C1 has only one 100Mb ethernet port. I'm considering the C2 vs XU4, wondering if the price difference justifies the potential performance gains. Anyone with a similar problem?

The C1 has a GigE port.

The XU4 is a more heafty chip than the C2. It's got USB3 as well which gives it beter I/O bandwidth if you want to plug some storage into it.

[Kendji]

The C1 has a GigE port.

The XU4 is a more heafty chip than the C2. It's got USB3 as well which gives it beter I/O bandwidth if you want to plug some storage into it.

W00t, don't know where I read 100Mb eth port. However I'm still considering the XU4 for the USB3 support, USB3 could potentially handle another gig eth-usb port and I'm also thinking about USB2 potentially bottlenecking my 2 attatched 7200rpm HDDs.

[Maury Markowitz]

Case in point: The ODROID-C1 kernel is still at 3.10, not sure if that is going to change anytime soon.

It is very important you note this before you buy an Odroid product! LinuxTV drivers were added in 3.16, which means pretty much none of the TV tuners work on the Odriod. This is also the case with many other hardware drivers. Unless you are doing something very mainstream, like a web server, make *absolutely sure* your target hardware works on it before buying. I didn't, now I have a $100 paperweight (product in Canadian dollars + eMMC w/OS + shipping + import duties).

[Maury Markowitz]

Case in point: The ODROID-C1 kernel is still at 3.10, not sure if that is going to change anytime soon.

Make sure you take note of this point! The Linux distros for the C-series are hopelessly out of date, and the somewhat-newer upper layers may hide that fact. To put this in perspective, most of LinuxTV was mainlined in 3.16, which means the vast majority of video hardware does not run on the Odroid.

Also make sure you are very much aware that there is no hardware video transcoding support on the Odroid, either on the Mali or using the CPU's vector instructions. This means that anything doing video decoding will actually run dramatically faster on a RPi, even a 2B.

[willmore]

Also make sure you are very much aware that there is no hardware video transcoding support on the Odroid, either on the Mali or using the CPU's vector instructions. This means that anything doing video decoding will actually run dramatically faster on a RPi, even a 2B.

That's not true at all. As a matter of fact, the C1 and the C2 have vastly better video decode hardware than any of the Rpi boards. The C1 does H.264/H.265/VC1 decode at 1080p. The C2 adds HDMI 2 and a better video decode engine that will do 4K at 60 Hz. The C1 can encode H.264 at 1080p30 while the C2 can do 1080p60.