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.