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  • Memo.Ray - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link

    I was looking last week for a board that is more powerful than the Rpi with better connectivity and on-board storage. This seems a great fit at a great price! Thanks for bringing it up. I will be looking forward for the full review.
  • extide - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link

    Don't forget the Beaglebone Black :)
  • ddriver - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link

    Don't forget ODROID. Cheapest version is US$65.00, you get quad core at 1.7 GHz with 2 gigs of ram. It will eat the CI20 for breakfast and remain hungry.

    What I dislike about this board the most is the poor PCB shape and connector placement. Seems really clumsy design.
  • Memo.Ray - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link

    I have to say, I'm not impressed by the board layout :)
  • ddriver - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link

    Meanwhile... this was released just today and looks like a 100% winner:

    ODROID-C1 features an Amlogic S805 SoC that features a 1.5GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A5 processor and Mali 450MP2 graphics. This board also has 1GB of DDDR3 memory, Gigabit Ethernet, 40 GPIO pins, eMMC / microSD storage, four USB 2.0 ports, and one USB OTG port.
  • ddriver - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link

    Forgot the most important bit - it is only 35 bucks.
  • jospoortvliet - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link

    Note that you can get a banana pi (dual a7) with SATA any 1gbit network port for 5-10 bucks over raspberry pi, too. Has been around for over half a year at EUR 40 in Europe, USD 55 in USA.
  • alexvoica - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link

    Hungry as in power-hungry?
  • ddriver - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link

    Read before you make stupid claims. ODROID U3 has much better performance/watt ratio.
  • alexvoica - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link

    Can you please provide mW/mHz numbers for the processor inside the board you've quoted to back up your claim?
  • ddriver - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link

    I have the board and have measured it. It is powered by 5 volts, at web browsing in consumes less than 0.5 amps, H264 DH playback - bellow 1 amp, about 1.5 amps on 100% CPU load for all cores. That makes 2.5 watts for web browsing, 5 watts for HD playback and 7.5 watts during CPU torture test.

    100% more cores at 50% higher clock speed, the U3 only consumes 50% more power. And you'd expect it does, seeing how it is 32nm vs what... like 40nm at least for the CI20...
  • alexvoica - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link

    Cool, and thanks for the info. I was highlighting how the eating for breakfast can actually be a more nuanced story. If you are looking at it from a performance point of view, then yes - ODROID-XU3 is certainly in another class.

    My remark was trying to attract your attention towards performance/power for entry-level boards, where MIPS (and this board) has a real advantage. For example, I've been running GeekBench, AndEBench and other CPU-intensive benchmarks and it rarely goes over 2.5-2.8W. Running graphics applications or doing HD video streaming gets it up to 2.4-3W (depending on the content). If you run it at full throttle (apps processor under full load + Ethernet + Wi-Fi + Bluetooth + SD card/USB transfers), it rarely goes up to 3.7-4W.
  • ddriver - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link

    Well, you did ask for mW/mHz which makes no sense at all considering that:

    a - mW/MHz is not a linear metric
    b - MHz is not a performance metric

    I was talking about U3, not XU3, the latter of which is far more powerful and expensive.

    The CI20 has the advantage of better feature set, you get BT, wifi and some nand out of the box, the U3 has the advantage of being more compact and more powerful. Get wifi and BT dongles for it, and the price goes up, even more so if you go for fast eMMC.
  • milli - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link

    Under GeekBench, he states, it doesn't go over 2.8W.
    You say when you load your CPU cores, it uses 7.5W.
    On a per core basis they're virtually identical (1.16mW/MHz vs 1.1mW/MHz) and considering that the Ingenic Jz4780 is a 40nm SOC, it didn't do bad.
    Ingenic will show more strength when they launch their XBurst2 based SOCs but keep in mind that Ingenic SOCs are not representative of MIPS licensable cores.
  • at80eighty - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link

    look at Cubox-i as well. solid board, clean form factor
  • R3MF - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link

    the broadcom GPU was supposed to be amazing powerful on introduction, and the PowerVR540 is thoroughly ancient, so I think that particular part of the battle may well go (massively) in the RasberryPi's favour.
  • alexvoica - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link

    Although SGX540 is an older GPU, it was also at the heart of some iconic devices including the original Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, Samsung Galaxy S smartphone, Motorola razr i and many others.
  • BryanC - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link

    Would love to see a comparison between this board and NVIDIA's Jetson.
  • alexvoica - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link

    Although that would be a fun comparison to make power-wise, please remember that this is an SoC targeting the affordable dev boards segment. This means it offers decent performance for every level class processors. BeagleBone Black would certainly fit the bill for such a comparison.

    Looking forward to Stephen's analysis!
  • BryanC - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link

    What does "it offers decent performance for every level class processors" mean?

    I get that the Jetson board is more expensive and bigger. Still, both of them are boards for developers working on embedded applications, it'd be fun for AnandTech to explain this space better.
  • alexvoica - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link

    It means that this processor has been designed for entry level devices (affordable tablets, low cost media players, etc.), therefore those design choices have implications in terms of performance.
  • BedfordTim - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link

    It isn't my area, but the ODroid XU3 might be a better bet. to go up against the Jetson
  • ddriver - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link

    Jetson is faster and has better features than XU3, and although more expensive it is a better bargain. The one downside I see to it, the board is huge compared to the XU3.
  • Samus - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link

    Nice, keep us posted Stephen
  • LostAlone - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link

    This seems to be in a weird place. It's more powerful than other boards certainly, but it's also not the most powerful on the market. The onboard wireless and storage is nice, but then you have to pay to get them. I'm not thrilled about a barrel connector over powering from micro USB too. This is certainly a good board and I'm sure people will do some cool things with it, but I just don't see how it stands out, and the design choices seem weird to me.
  • alexvoica - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link

    When looking at this board (which is first in a family of upcoming dev platforms), I think it is important to stay away from any direct comparisons when looking at it for the first time. Instead, this should be seen primarily as a general purpose platform for Android/Linux developers who have been hungry for a MIPS + PowerVR processor.

    How it benchmarks against other platforms, albeit important, is secondary to its main goal.
  • DaveSmart - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link

    Just got our shiny new CI20 board here at DroidScript HQ. We are hoping that a combination of this board (running Android) and DroidScript will make the perfect mix for young developers :) It will be awesome to have an Android based alternative to the Pie. There are legions of Android devs out there who might get very excited about this board too!

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