Quad-Core ODROID-X Battles NVIDIA Tegra 3
While not as popular as NVIDIA's Tegra 3 ARM SoC, the Samsung Exynos 4412 quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 found on cheaply priced ODROID-X can actually outperform the quad-core NVIDIA ARM processor. Here are benchmarks of the $129 USD ODROID-X benchmarked against the NVIDIA Tegra 3 reference tablet and a PandaBoard ES running the Texas Instruments OMAP4460.
The ODROID-X is a recently-launched development board out of Korea that sells for only $129 USD but sports a quad-core Samsung ARM SoC. The specifications on the ORDROID-X include a Samsung Exynos 4412 quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 1.4GHz SoC, a Mali-400 MP Core, six USB 2.0 ports, one 10/100MB Ethernet port, 1080p video output via micro-HDMI, 1GB of LP-DDR2 system memory, supports Android 4.0.4 ICS / Linaro/Ubuntu Linux, and micro SD/SDHC for storage.
The specifications on this development board are impressive for being a current-generation ARM Cortex-A9 part that's quad-core, but the price makes it extremely attractive. The popular OMAP4 PandaBoard ES is still selling for $160 USD while it's only a dual-core OMAP4 1.2GHz ARM SoC, features less USB 2.0 ports, etc. The ODROID-X is certainly more expensive than the Raspberry Pi, but again with this Korean development board we have four much more powerful ARMv7 cores. The ODROID-X also features Mali-400 graphics, which can be optionally used by the open-source Lima graphics driver project.
The ODROID-X is still shipping in limited quantities (if you order right now, the board isn't expected to ship for about three weeks), but fortunately Kurt Keville of Massachusetts Institute of Technology already received his ODROID-X boards and loaded them up with the latest release of the Ubuntu-based Linaro 12.08. Kurt has shared these results with Phoronix. Before getting to these quad-core Exynos 4412 benchmark results, be sure to check out the Phoronix 12-core ARM cluster benchmarks for reference and then the 96-core Ubuntu ARM solar-powered cluster that was built earlier this summer at MIT.