ODROID-X Open Exynos4 Quad Mobile Development Platform

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

This looks great for around £84 delivered:

http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_20.../prdt_info.php

It seems to use similar parts to the Samsung Galaxy S III.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Surprised no one is interested on this TBH!!

[scaryjim]

The board looks interest enough, but it's still only a dev board. You have to spend extra on a pre-loaded SD card with OS or mess around trying to install it yourself. It'd be a fun thing if I had time to play around or I wanted to do a lot of native ARM/Android development, but otherwise I don't see the point.

I think a lot of hexites have hit the stage now where they just want to buy something and have it work. For the same cost you can get a Celeron G530, cheap H61 mobo and 2GB of DDR3-1333 RAM, which is a lot more straightforward, probably better performing, and easier to set up! An extra tenner would get you an A4-3300 setup instead, if you wanted decent graphics performance, or you could get a Sempron 140 + 760G AM3 board for a tenner less if you wanted something cheaper.

The problem is, an £84 computer is doable in a variety of ways now, most of which are a lot easier to handle than this dev board. It makes it a very hard sell...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The OS is available for download yourself onto an SD card if you have one available. Moreover,Ubuntu 12.04 for ARM will be made available for the board and this board is smaller than nano-ITX too. Try looking at the price of a Nano-ITX X86 motherboards. Moreover with the full sized boards you need to include all the other parts so they are not that cheap either. At least a DC-DC PSU and AC adaptor or a normal PSU will cost you above £25 new.

Anyway,£120 for the full setup including embedded MMC card,PSU,wireless is not too bad at all(it will be under £100 if you use your own SD card). The Exynos4412 is a powerful ARM based SOC:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exynos

It will hardly consume any power and is silent too.

I believe one or two people over on OcUK have ordered one - I might see how they get on with it.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

[scaryjim]

Not denying it's not an interesting piece of tech CAT, I just think it's aimed at a minority audience that doesn't necessarily hang out on Hexus Might well end up being a pre-cursor to some nice set-top gaming/internet boxes, and I've got a couple of friends - not on Hexus - who I think would love it!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It appears to come with quite a nice case too!! It seems the CPU is now faster it seems and AFAIK,there seems to be more RAM included too.

The base kit with the case and power supply comes to around £80 delivered with 2GB of RAM:

http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_20...=G135341370451



So now you have a Cortex A9 quad core running at 1.7GHZ,Mali 400 quad core GPU and 2GB of RAM for only £61 now!!

There is also a lower clocked version with 1GB of RAM for around £67 delivered with a power supply:

http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_20...=G135341359084

There is also this enhanced version with 6 USB2.0 ports too:

http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_20...=G135235611947

[circuitmonkey]

I saw this another tech site () and was interested.
Already owning a Pi, which spec wise is a different league, the lack of SATA port is enough to make me stick with what I have
Any idea of the GPU driver is open source? this would be a great advantage over the Pi

Edit: Open source graphics driver should be possible http://limadriver.org/

[abaxas]

The board looks interest enough, but it's still only a dev board. You have to spend extra on a pre-loaded SD card with OS or mess around trying to install it yourself. It'd be a fun thing if I had time to play around or I wanted to do a lot of native ARM/Android development, but otherwise I don't see the point.

I think a lot of hexites have hit the stage now where they just want to buy something and have it work. For the same cost you can get a Celeron G530, cheap H61 mobo and 2GB of DDR3-1333 RAM, which is a lot more straightforward, probably better performing, and easier to set up! An extra tenner would get you an A4-3300 setup instead, if you wanted decent graphics performance, or you could get a Sempron 140 + 760G AM3 board for a tenner less if you wanted something cheaper.

The problem is, an £84 computer is doable in a variety of ways now, most of which are a lot easier to handle than this dev board. It makes it a very hard sell...

Why go x86/x64? More arm based computers are produced every 6months than there has ever been PC compatibles produced.

Intel/amd are niche products.

[scaryjim]

Why go x86/x64?

To get something that just works and is easy to manage/support/troubleshoot/upgrade/repair/replace?

We're almost 5 months after that post now, and I stand by it - this is a development board. It has a limited sphere of interest.

Intel/amd are niche products.

Not as far as desktop computing goes. Sure, there are more ARM processors out there, but they're all in consumer electronics devices, that you buy once then don't worry about until you replace them. And whilst a lot of PCs are treated the same way, this isn't a PC. It's a development board. It's the same concept as buying a motherboard, CPU, RAM, storage etc. then building a PC out of them. And the PC is easier, more upgradable and configurable, and at the time was the same price or cheaper. There's nothing you could do with this dev board that you couldn't do with an x86 PC of similar cost.

As I said in the post *after* the one you quoted: "Might well end up being a pre-cursor to some nice set-top gaming/internet boxes". But until it's turned into a consumer product, I don't see the draw. ARM processors per se might not be niche, but an SOC dev board certainly is. As a dev board, it's certainly a fairly interesting product. But it's a niche interest, and one I don't have.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The problem is the PCs are not cheaper though,and are much bigger. Even mini-ITX motherboards are a couple of time bigger than this. ATX and mATX are not even worthy of mention in this situation either.

Even nano-ITX and pico-ITX x86 motherboards are bigger and are more expensive. Those are the motherboards the ODROID needs to be compared with.

It is also fanless. The cheapest new mini-ITX fanless motherboard with CPU(Asus C60M1-I or an Atom based one)would be around £55 £60 plus RAM,so that would be at least £70 and still it is bigger. DC-DC PSUs are not cheap to get brand new,and even the cheapest decent new PSU normal PSU is around £25 to £30. Even a cheap DC-DC setup is at least £50. Plus you need a case.

So that is still at least £100 to £120 plus the case. That is around 25% to 50% more. Also they are much bigger.

Edit!!

Then there is also the Ouya too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouya

That should be around £60 to £70.

It is less powerful overall too than the ODROID,whose base specifications show that it is more powerful than Windows RT tablets.

Even with RP once you start adding a case and PSU starts to hit £40 to £50. The ODROID-U is aroudn £60 delivered including the case and a power supply. It can run XBMC it appears better than the RP.

[scaryjim]

I'm not knocking this board CAT, seriously I'm not.

abaxas quoted from a post where I was specifically addressing why I thought there was a lack of interest in this on hexus when you originally posted it. My opinion on that hasn't changed; I don't think this is something that PC enthusiasts - the majority of the hexus hardware audience - would particularly go for. It lacks the upgradability and expandability of PC hardware, but also lacks the integration and ease of use of consumer electronics. That makes it very much a niche product. So I'm not at all surprised that on hexus it hasn't fired a huge wave of interest.

I know places where you could post this and people would praise it to the high heavens, and I have a number of friends - who don't use hexus - who I'm sure would love it. If I had spare time on my hands on a bit of disposable income I might even invest in one myself - in fact if I was in the same situation now that I was ten years ago I'm sure I'd jump at it. But I'm not - I'm ten years older, my life has changed a lot, and I simply don't have the time to spend on something like this. I suspect a lot of people on hexus are in the same situation. I'm not saying I think the product is worthless or pointless: it has its niche and probably fills it very well. But I don't think it's a niche that many people on Hexus sit in.

And let's be honest, this thing *shouldn't* be compared with industrial/IPC motherboards, or in fact any x86 motherboard, because it has a completely different target market. It is a development board, targeted at people who want to do software development for the Exynos SoC family. Sure, it can be put to use other ways, but it's not an industrial high-availability component like Nano- and Pico-itx and the other SBC platforms, nor is it a consumer PC component like a traditional mITX/(m)ATX. It's a dev board. It has no guarantee of stability, operability, compatibility, continued support ... it's a risk and a faff. And I think that's why it isn't getting that much interest on hexus.

But frankly it's a bit pointless dredging up a 5 month old discussion about the level of interest in this thread on Hexus, given that it had lain dormant for 5 months after my last comment on it. I think that gives all the indication necessary of how interested hexites in general were with the board - which is all I was talking about originally anyway.

It's a lovely bit of tech. But not that interesting to most hexites.

[abaxas]

^ exactly.

Also it is important to bring to people's attention that desktop 'PCs' are only a very small part of the computing world. Especially as the 2nd/3rd world is developing with little or no understanding of what a desktop PC is. If anything it is becoming old fashioned.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I would still rather have one of these or an Ouya for around £60 to £70 over a RP,which TBH is really no cheaper once you add a power supply and case(£50 to £60). The Ouya even looks better than the RP too especially at $99.

The RP is as much a dev board as any of these.

IMHO,the RP is too overhyped for what it is,and people gloss over its faults too much.

[scaryjim]

The RP is as much a dev board as any of these.

Indeed, and I've never considered it to be anything else. The whole point of the RP was to create an affordable computer on which young people could learn to program and get a head-start in computer science. And as such, I have no real interest in that either

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The RP is more like a Super-Arduino for me TBH. For a cheap media centre,I think the others are better.

Having said,I have enough SFF PCs at the moment so I have no practical need for any of them.OTH,a tiny desktop running Ubuntu would be cool though.

I am interested in how the Ouya does pan out though. I think that has potential.

I would really like one with SATA capability,and the only one seems to be this:

http://cubieboard.org/

I have a little project involving my DAS.