ODROID-XU4: Much Better Performance Than The Raspberry Pi Plus USB3 & Gigabit Ethernet @ $60

Hardkernel recently sent over the ODROUD-XU4 for benchmarking. This ARM SBC that just measures in at about 82 x 58 x 22 mm offers much better performance than many of the sub-$100 ARM SBCs while also featuring dual USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, eMMC storage, and is software compatible with the older XU3 ARM SBCs. Here's a look at the performance of the ODROID-XU4 compared to a variety of other single board computers.

This ~$60+ ARM single board computer is built around a Samsung Exynos5422 SoC that features four Cortex-A15 cores at 2.0GHz and four Cortex-A7 cores at 1.3GHz while the graphics are provided by a Mali-T628.

Going in hand with this Exynos5 SoC is 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM, HDMI 1.4 supporting 1080p output, one USB 2.0 port, two USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11n WiFi, 30-pin GPIO header, and all of this fits on a PCB just 83 x 58 mm.

For cooling the Exynos5 SoC, an active heatsink ships with this ARM SBC. There are thermal results later in this article but the fan is certainly needed in the case of this SoC/board.

The ODROID-XU4 officially supports Ubuntu 18.04 with the Linux 4.9 and 4.14 ARM kernels while there are also Android images available as well as different third-party images. The ODROID Wiki continues to be quite useful for those wishing to learn more about the technical details and other information on Hardkernel SBCs.

My testing was using the Ubuntu 18.04 image with the Linux 4.14.37 kernel and it uses the GCC 7.3 compiler by default. For getting an idea about the performance capabilities of this ARM SBC I benchmarked it up against the ASUS Tinker Board, Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, Jetson TX1, Jetson TX2, ODROID C1 Plus, ALL-H3-CC H5 2GB, and AML-S905X-CC 2GB. All of these ARM Linux benchmarks were carried out using the Phoronix Test Suite.