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$50 ODROID-C4 Raspberry Pi 4 Competitor Combines Amlogic S905X3 SoC with 4GB RAM
Hardkernel has just launched an update to its ODROID-C2 board, with ODROID-C4 SBC equipped with a 2.0 GHz Amlogic S905X3 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor combined with up to 4GB RAM, four USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI 2.0 video output, and the usual 40-pin I/O header.
That makes it a worthy competitor to Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB RAM, especially since it supports Ubuntu 20.04, CoreELEC, Android 9, and LineageOS operating systems, and comes with a proper heatsink for cooling for just $50 plus shipping.
[...] Besides benchmarks and power consumption, the boards also differ in terms of features. For example, Raspberry Pi 4 offers dual HDMI output and built-in WiFi and Bluetooth, while ODROID-C4 comes with a single HDMI port, and WiFi/Bt is optional via a USB dongle. On the other hand, ODROID-C4 comes with four USB 3.0 ports, and offers support for eMMC flash module, while RPi 4 features 2x USB 3.0 + 2x USB 2.0 ports, and does not offer an eMMC option.
See also: Raspberry Pi 4 vs ODROID-C4 Features Comparison
Also at Notebookcheck and LinuxGizmos.
(Score: 1) by petecox on Thursday April 30 2020, @11:04AM (5 children)
It will encourage rockchip and allwinner to lift their game.
Up the RAM to ≥ 8GB and we might see the year of the ARM64 Linux desktop!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Thursday April 30 2020, @12:31PM (4 children)
Some SBCs out there have 8 GB of RAM, it just isn't common yet. RPi 5 will probably include an 8 GB SKU, since the 1 GB SKU of RPi 4 has been eliminated, leaving only 2/4. So expect it to be normalized within 2-3 years.
If you meant that the SoCs themselves need to support the amount of RAM, in RPi 4's case the Broadcom BCM2711 can address up to 16 GB. Rockchip RK3399 can only do 4 GB, but it's likely that the RK3588 [wikipedia.org] will allow more.
RPi 4 is the ARM desktop (32-bit if Raspbian is running on it). They have sold millions of them.
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(Score: 1) by petecox on Thursday April 30 2020, @02:15PM (1 child)
Yeah, I was referring to TV boxes and Pinebook that seem to max out at 3 or 4GB due to SoC limits. admittedly costing a magnitude more, a smartphone may contain triple that.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday April 30 2020, @10:50PM
I didn't look at the RK3399Pro:
https://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/2019/12/04/introducing-the-rock-pi-n10-rk3399pro-sbc-for-ai-and-deep-learning/ [seeedstudio.com]
4 GB has been given to the CPU and GPU, with another 4 GB dedicated to the "NPU".
I'm guessing that 4 GB is still the limit for the CPU/GPU but the NPU gets its own memory channel. Still, that's neat.
In smartphone land, 16 GB [soylentnews.org] has been hit. But you just know that some mad lad company will try to put out a 20 GB or 24 GB RAM smartphone within the next 2 years.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @06:46PM (1 child)
I don't have a good sense of scale for performance, how practical is it to run applications in an 8GB SBC ARM processor that actually use more than 4GB of memory? My vague, completely made up on the spot sense is that if you ran program that needs 6GB of memory on a SBC ARM processor it would be so absurdly bottlenecked by the CPU that the extra RAM would be a waste.
It just seems odd to me that $500 laptops with 15 watt processors and 4GB of RAM are still commonplace, but now we're getting into SBCs with - presumably? - much less computing power but potentially 8GB or more of RAM.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday April 30 2020, @10:40PM
Just by using the web browser and opening browser tabs (not an insane amount of them), I can eventually tie up most of the RAM in cache/buffer until it starts dipping into the default 100 MiB of swap on the microSD card. Clearly, JavaScript is partially responsible, but there you have it.
If there is any one application that can legitimately use up most of the 4 GB and need it, it's probably machine learning ("on the edge"): Image recognition - what 4GB of memory can do [raspberrypi.org]. RPi Foundation just launched a new camera [raspberrypi.org] so it's likely people will be doing more of that. Some SBCs are more specifically oriented towards machine learning. For example, the RockChip RK3399Pro has a dedicated "NPU", and can apparently have its own RAM as seen here in the Rock Pi N10 [seeedstudio.com].
I recently picked up a Lenovo 100e with 4GB of RAM and MediaTek MT8173C (similar specs to RPi 4) for about $70. It uses zram so that amount is stretched further. In laptop deals [slickdeals.net], it looks like 8 GB RAM has been segmented into ~$350 territory. But if we go by the RPi 4B's launch prices, 1/2/4 GB for $35/45/55, it seems likely that 8 GB could have been offered at a $75 price point. RPi Foundation has dropped the 1 GB SKU from the lineup and lowered the price of 2 GB to $35, and RAM prices will probably drop over the next 2-3 years, so an 8 GB SKU of RPi 5 seems likely.
Part of the problem with laptops is that they've gone thinner, perhaps switched to 1 DIMM single-channel, but most importantly, the memory is often soldered. So there is no ability to upgrade it. I would have no problem picking up a cheap $200 laptop with 4 GB and dropping a 32 GB SO-DIMM into it for another $100. And it would be worth it to me since I could open an absurd amount of stuff on it. But where's the $300 32 GB RAM laptop? Nowhere to be found.
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