New Product: ODROID-C4

New Product: ODROID-C4

Today, the ODROID line has been increased by one, an exciting single board computer (SBC) similar in size to many of today's most popular SBCs including Raspberry Pi, ODROID-C1+, ODROID-C2, ASUS Tinker Board, ROCK64, Pine H64-B, and more.

The ODROID-C4 is the latest generation of SBC that is even more powerful and energy efficient compared to the ODROID-C2, its predecessor which was released over four years ago.

The CPU of the ODROID-C4 is an Amlogic S905X3, a more powerful variant of the S905 present in the ODROID-C2. The S905X3 contains quad Cortex-A55 64-bit processing cores with a new generation Mali-G31 GPU. The S905X3 runs at 2.0GHz without thermal throttling when using the stock heatsink, which allows a robust and quiet SBC. When compared to the ODROID-C2, the multi-core performance is around 40% faster and the system DRAM is approximately 50% faster!

 

A CPU (Amlogic S905X3) H 2x System LED indicators
B DDR4 Memory (4GiB) I 1x UART for system console
C 4x USB3.0 host ports J 1x IR Receiver
D 1x RJ45 Ethernet Port (10/100/1000) K 40x GPIO pins
E 1x HDMI 2.0 4K L 7x GPIO I2S pins
F 1x microUSB2.0 port (OTG) M 1x eMMC module socket
G 1x DC power jack (OD 5.5mm, ID 2.1mm) N 1x microSD slot

CPU Performance

Dhrystone-2, Double-Precision Whetstone, 7-zip compression benchmark results show the ODROID-C4 system performance is ~40-55% faster than the previous generation ODROID-C2.

GPU Performance

The Mali-G31 runs at 650MHz and is ~50% faster than Mali-450MP in ODROID-C2. The Mali-G31 is the first generation Bifrost-based mainstream GPU from Arm.

GPU performance was measured with the glmark2-es2 “–off-screen” option.

RAM Performance

Why does DDR4 matter? ODROID-C4 DDR4 RAM runs at 1320Mhz. The memory bandwidth is 1.6 times higher than ODROID-C2.

CPU Frequency to Performance Ratio

Some ODROID users may recall the lower than expected clock speed with ODROID-C2’s S905.

Tests were performed to confirm the ratio between CPU clock frequency and performance with ODROID-C4.

Thermal Characteristics

To check thermal throttling, heavy CPU and GPU loads were run together on the SoC and the temperature was monitored. The test was performed within a chamber that maintained the ambient temperature at 25°C.

Note that the current thermal throttling point is set at 75°C in the Kernel configuration.

Note that if the ODROID-C4 board is housed in an enclosure and the continuous computing load is high, some thermal throttling issues may be encountered when the ambient temperature is higher than 20°C.

Ethernet Performance

According to iperf test results, the throughput performance is in the 1Gbps range.

USB Performance

The USB3 transfer speeds were measured with a UAS-capable SSD.

The average throughput indicated speeds of ~340MB/s (~2.7Gbps).

As the four USB host ports share a single root hub, the transfer rate will be lower if multiple USB3 devices are transferring simultaneously.

eMMC Storage Performance

Sequential read and write speeds are over 165MB/s and 125MB/s respectively.

4K random access performance is fast as well. iozone test results are as follows.

MicroSD UHS-I Storage Performance

Using properly implemented UHS dynamic voltage scaling, the sequential read and write speed is over 70MB/s and 50MB/s respectively.

Cryptography Performance

The ARMv8 architecture supports hardware accelerated crypto extensions for building a secure system. As expected, very decent openSSL performance was experienced with ODROID-C4.

GPIO (40-pin) Header

The ODROID-C4 GPIO interface is similar to the one on the ODROID-C2 and fully supports a 3.3Volt interface. This is beneficial for using various peripherals without complicated level shifters as with the XU4’s 1.8Volt GPIOs. Another big improvement is a faster SPI bus interface with a maximum frequency of about 100Mhz. It is significantly faster than the ODROID-C2’s 400Khz software “bit-banged” SPI.

Power Consumption

Thanks to the modern 12nm fabricated S905X3 CPU, the power consumption and heat dissipation are very low.

This leads to a quiet and powerful computer with high energy efficiency.

Idle state: ≃ 0.18 Watt
Heavy load state: 3.1~3.3 Watt (stress-ng –cpu 4 –cpu-method matrixprod)
No cables were attached except DC power input and USB-UART debug console cable.

Note:

  • The power consumption in “IDLE” is measured when a device is not being operated for 5 minutes since the CPU governor is set to ‘performance’.
  • The measured power consumption is not absolute and could vary in certain conditions.

 

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Comments

Bo - July 27, 2020

Robbie, when the voltage increases for a particular circuit, the required current (amps) decreases for the same load. But overall power consumption stays roughly the same.

Example:
12V x 1A = 12 watts
15V x 0.8A = 12 watts

Robbie - July 27, 2020

Is overall power consumption affected by the power supply voltage?

Bo - May 11, 2020

Dave, yes. However, some devices require a special driver to work.

Dave Stenhouse - May 11, 2020

Is the 40 pin GPIO header compatible with devices designed for Raspberry Pi?

Bo - April 24, 2020

In the past, none of the Android images for ODROID come with Google Play installed due to licensing restrictions plus privacy concerns for people who don’t want to be tracked by Google. However, Google Play can be installed easily by going to https://opengapps.org/ from the browser on the Android OS that you want to install Google Play Store on.

Ivan L Montalvo - April 24, 2020

Good morning, The emmc chip for the new board odroid c4 android version the system come with google play?

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