ODROID-N2L, very small in size but powerful in performance

The ODROID-N2L is the low-cost variant of our most popular and powerful ARM SBC ODROID-N2+. 

This project was actually initiated at the request of several B2B customers. They were satisfied with the performance and convenience of the highly versatile N2+. However, they wanted to embed a relatively compact, cost-effective, simple, and still high-performance SBC into their system.

Therefore, we made it!

  • Smaller and neater form factor: 69 x 56mm 
  • Small size allows for mounting inside a variety of small devices
  • Suitable for various standalone embedded system which don’t require Ethernet connectivity
  • Suitable for building robots, drones, arcade consoles, human-machine-interface devices, and many other applications
  • Faster and lower power consumption LPDDR4 RAM
  • Lightweight
  • Low cost

We replaced the DDR4 RAM chips with a single LPDDR4 chip to minimize the PCB form factor and reduce power consumption. As a bonus, around 20% higher DRAM interface clock frequency is an obvious and important improvement. We could find 10% to 20% of increased system performance compared to the original N2+ in various benchmark test results. The GPU benchmark glmark2-es2 also showed about 10% of increased performance which is  very similar to the improvement of the memory bandwidth (MBW) test.

ODROID-N2L with 4GByte RAM : https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-n2l-with-4gbyte-ram ODROID-N2L with 2GByte RAM : https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-n2l-with-2gbyte-ram

The ODROID H-series is back

The ODROID H-series is back It is more powerful, offers higher performance and comes in two brand new models.

ODROID-H3+ : https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h3-plus/

ODROID-H3 : https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h3/

Intel® Quad-Core Processor Jasper Lake N5105(H3+: N6005) has a base clock of 2GHz and a boost clock of 2.9GHz (H3+: 3.3GHz) with 1.5 MB L2 and 4 MB L3 cache by a 10 nm process.
Up to 64GB Dual-channel Memory DDR4 PC4-23400 (2933MT/s)
Two SO-DIMM slots, up to 32GB per slot
PCIe 3.0 x 4 lanes for one M.2 NVMe storage
2 x 2.5Gbit Ethernet ports
2 x SATA 3.0 ports
SSE4.2 accelerator (SMM, FPU, NX, MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AES)
Intel UHD Graphics 24 EUs(H3+:32 EUs) Turbo 800MHz(H3+:900MHz)
HDMI 2.0 and DP 1.2 multiple video outputs
A configurable Unlimited Performance mode allowing the CPU to run in sustained turbo boost mode.

ODROID-GO ULTRA

ODROID-GO ULTRA is a new gaming focused development platform. Its overall system was designed based on our powerful ODROID-N2+. OGU’s exterior and LCD size are the same as OGS, but the internal core components have been completely redesigned. The OGU PCB shape is identical to the OGS, but it has a totally different circuit design and requires a heatsink to cool down its more powerful CPU.

ODROID-GO ULTRA Dim Gray

ODROID-GO ULTRA Clear White

Specification

ProcessorCPU : Amlogic S922X (Quad-core Cortex-A73(2.2Ghz) and Dual-core Cortex-A53(2Ghz)
ARMv8-A architecture with Neon and Crypto extensions
GPU : Mali-G52 GPU with 6 x Execution Engines (846Mhz)
OSUbuntu 20.04.4 on Kernel 4.9.277 Aarch64
Modified EmulationStation front-end with Libretro. GPU accelerated OpenGL-ES on DRM-FB
Memory2GiB (LPDDR4 1608Mhz, 32 Bits bus width)
StorageOn board 16GiB eMMC, Micro SD Card slot(UHS-1 Capable interface)
Display5inch 854×480 TFT LCD (Wide viewing angle display, MIPI-DSI interface)
AudioEarphone stereo jack, 0.5Watt 8Ω Mono speaker
BatteryLi-Polymer 3.7V/4000mAh(76.5×54.5×7.5mm), Up to 6 hours of continuous game playing time
Power Supply5V input, USB-C power connector : A USB -C charging Y cable with type-A is included in the package.
Maximum drawing current: 1.5Amp
Support USB 2.0 Device on the USB-C port
External I/OUSB 2.0 Host x 1
Input ButtonsF1, F2, F3, F4, F5, F6, A, B, X, Y, Direction Pad, Left Shoulder, Right Shoulder, Left Shoulder2, Right Shoulder2, Analog joystick, Analog joystick2
WirelessOptional USB dual-band WiFi Bluetooth combo adapter
Power consumptionGame emulation: 800 ~ 1300mA (depends on backlit brightness and type of game emulations and the wireless usage), Power off mode: <1mA
Charging time3 ~ 4 hours when off. 6 ~ 7 hours when in use.
Dimensions204x86x25 mm, Weight: 299 g (8 oz)

ODROID-M1 with a wide range of useful peripherals

The ODROID-M1 is a single board computer with a wide range of useful peripherals developed for use in a variety of embedded system applications. 8GByte RAM and 4GByte RAM versions are available.

The CPU has four ARM Cortex-A55 processors with low power consumption and high efficiency operation at 2Ghz. A larger 8GB of LPDDR4 DRAM Memory is available. Petitboot pre-installed into the on-board 16MiB of SPI-Flash Memory helps manage various OS and kernel versions easily and supports booting from microSD, eMMC, NVMe, SATA, and USB storage devices. A standard size 22mm x 80mm M.2 NVMe storage device can be directly installed on the ODROID-M1 board. A single native (non-USB) SATA 3.0 port is provided for use with a 2.5inch HDD or SSD NAND Memory storage device. The four-lane MIPI-DSI port can be directly connected to a LCD panel. The two-lane MIPI-CSI port can be directly connected to a camera sensor module. Since Machine Learning has been a trend in this industry, there is a neural network processing unit (NPU) which can deliver up to 0.8 TOPS on the M1 single board computer. A sleek and cool blue M1 Metal Case Kit is an available option to protect your ODROID-M1 board. 

ODROID-HC4 is new Home-Cloud platform

ODROID-HC4 is new Home-Cloud platform based on the same ARM CPU as the ODROID-C4. We adopted a 12nm fabricated energy efficient 1.8Ghz Cortex-A55 quad core processor with faster 4GB DDR4 RAM. A 16MiB SPI flash chip exists on the board for the useful Petitboot feature.

ODROID-HC4 with OLED : https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4-oled/

ODROID-HC4 : https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/

Technical information at WiKi : https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-hc4/odroid-hc4

We adopted a 12nm fabricated energy efficient 1.8Ghz Cortex-A55 quad core processor with faster 4GB DDR4 RAM. A 16MiB SPI flash chip exists on the board for the useful Petitboot feature.

We decided to drop the use of USB3.0 to SATA bridge solutions (quirks, additional IO layer, etc) for the ODROID HC4. We are therefore using a more native and reliable PCIe to SATA direct bridge solutions. In doing so the HC4 board provides two SATA storage docks.

A 5.5mm DC power jack, UHS-1 compatible micro-SD slot, USB 2.0, HDMI 2.0 and 1GbE port are available on the rear side of the transparent shell case.

Need for Speed? Need for More Speed? ODROID-N2+

We announced the S922X hexa-core powered ODROID-N2 device almost 15 months ago as one of the fastest ARM single board computers.
The default maximum Cortex-A73 quad-core clock frequency was 1.8Ghz and Cortex-A53 dual-core frequency was 1.9Ghz.

Recently, the SoC vendor Amlogic released a revised silicon design of the S922X.
Rev-A is replaced by Rev-C with an improved CPU core power rail budget and higher clock frequencies.

Before: Meson chip version = RevA (29:A – 40:0)
After: Meson chip version = RevC (29:C – 40:0)

With the revised chip design, the Cortex-A73 big-core maximum clock frequency is now 2.2Ghz.
This results in a 22% performance improvement over the previous 1.8Ghz clock frequency.

We call this new beast of a SBC the “ODROID-N2-Plus”. The price will remain the same as the previous model.

Need even more performance? Why not!
We’ve just tested over 300 samples of the revised N2+ boards, and we found that all of the boards could be overclocked to 2.4Ghz. This is a 33% clock frequency improvement over the original N2.
We could finally enjoy some GameCube retro games on 64bit Android OS with a playable speed thanks to the overclock.
Please note that we can’t guarantee the overclock to 2.4Ghz but we believe most of them will work at that frequency range.

The Ubuntu 20.04 Gnome desktop experience with the Wayland GPU driver is also quite impressive. Upstream kernel 5.7 can use the hardware VPU acceleration via a slightly modified MPV.

We will release Android and Ubuntu OS images for ODROID-N2+ within a couple of days.

Here is a brief performance comparison chart

N2plusBenchmarks1.png

A cooling fan may be required to prevent “throttling” due to the SoC temperature if your computing load is continuously very high at 2.4Ghz clock speed and the ambient temperature is 35°C (95°F) or higher.
We are selling a large 80mm quiet cooling fan separately to support the 2.4Ghz turbo speed at higher ambient temperature. https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/80x80x1 … connector/
Otherwise, the stock heatsink is enough for a normal room temperature 25°C (77°F) or less.

ODROID-N2Plus-2208-NOFAN.png
ODROID-N2Plus-2208-FAN.png
ODROID-N2Plus-2400-NOFAN.png
ODROID-N2Plus-2400-FAN.png

Additionally, the onboard RTC backup battery source was changed to a widely available bare RC2032 coin cell instead of a proprietary one. You can keep the time over several years once you install a coin battery.

N2pluscoolingfanxh.jpg

The system height decreased from 34mm to 29mm approximately thanks to the slimmer heatsink.

N2vsN2plussize1.jpg

Availability: You can order 4GB model now and we will start shipping from 20 July.
N2+ 4GB model($79) https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid- … yte-ram-2/
N2+ Cooling Fan($4) https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/80x80x1 … connector/

2GB model will be ready to order from 21 July and shipping from 24 July.
N2+ 2GB model($63) https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid- … yte-ram-2/

ODROID-H2+ is now available with more features

– Intel J4115 is a slightly modified version of J4105.
– 2x 2.5GbE networks are implemented with the latest NIC chipset RTL8215B.
– USB2.0 and HDMI CEC signals are added to GPIO ports increasing the number of pins to 24 from 20.
-12Volt SATA power circuit is changed to improve the suspend-resume power controller sequence of 3.5inch HDDs.
https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h2plus/

ODROID-C4

ODROID-C4 is a new generation single board computer that is more energy efficient and faster performing than ODROID-C2 which was introduced over four years ago as the world’s first affordable ARM 64bit computer.

The main CPU of the ODROID-C4 is built with a quad-core Cortex-A55 cluster with a new generation Mali-G31 GPU. The A55 cores run at 2.0Ghz without thermal throttling using the stock heat sink allowing a robust and quiet computer. The CPU multi-core performance is around 40% faster, and the system DRAM performance is 50% faster than the ODROID-C2.

7th Year anniversary of the ODROID Magazine

Happy new year to all the ODROIDians out there around the world. To start off the new year, we have a terrific issue for you which highlights the new ODROID-GO Advanced. If that wasn’t enough we are kicking off things off with a Linux 5.4 development party for the ODROID-Xu4. Along with this, we have several great tutorials highlighting projects done with an ODROID-N2. All this and more is available in this month’s issue.

ODROID-GO Advance

We announced the ODROID-GO in 2018 June to celebrate our 10th birthday.
It was amazing and fun to be able to emulate old-school 8-bit retro games with more than expected performance with only the MCU, not the high scale MPU.
The device has been very popular not only for gaming but also for education.

We continued to hear users who wanted to play 16-bit or 32-bit retro games on a handheld device with more advanced features and capabilities.
Therefore we started to research a new platform from early this year and we found a suitable solution
And we’ve spent several months to develop a new 64bit Linux powered device.

This new device ODROID-GO Advance has a modern 64bit ARM low-power quad-core processor(MPU ) as well as wide-viewing-angle 3.5inch LCD.

Specification

Image

At this moment, the trial BSP image supports the following systems.
* atari2600
* atari5200
* atari7800
* atarilynx
* gamegear
* gb
* gba
* gbc
* mastersystem
* megadrive
* nes
* pcengine
* pcenginecd
* psx
* segacd
* snes
* psp

Let’s see how it emulates various retro game systems well.

You have to look into this assembly guide video first before playing. Otherwise, you must have a difficult time or regret.

Further technical information : WiKi page ==> https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid_go_advance/start

We are going to send some engineering samples to community developers in the middle of next week to improve the system software.

It will start selling at us$55 from the end of January.

ODROID-N2

Forum : https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=176&t=33781

ODROID-N2 is a new generation single board computer that is more powerful, more stable, and faster performing than N1.
The main CPU of the N2 is based on big.Little architecture which integrates a quad-core ARM Cortex-A73 CPU cluster and a dual core Cortex-A53 cluster with a new generation Mali-G52 GPU.
Thanks to the modern 12nm silicon technology, the A73 cores runs at 1.8Ghz without thermal throttling using the stock metal-housing heatsink allowing a robust and quiet computer.
The CPU multi-core performance is around 20% faster and the 4GByte DDR4 RAM is 35% faster than the N1. The N2’s DDR4 RAM is running at 1320Mhz while N1’s DDR3 was running at 800Mhz.
The large metal housing heatsink is designed to optimize the CPU and RAM heat dissipation and minimize throttling. The CPU is placed on the bottom side of the PCB to establish great thermal characteristics.

Board Detail


N2 block diagram

CPU performance
Dhrystone-2, Double-Precision Whetstone, Sysbench and Memory bandwidth benchmark results show the N2 system performance comes out ahead of other popular ARM SBCs.

GPU performance
The Mali-G52 runs at 846Mhz and is ~10% faster than Mali-T860MP4 in ODROID-N1.
The Mali-G52 is the second Bifrost-based mainstream GPU from Arm.
There are two Shader Processors in the GPU and each core has three Execution Engines. This is sometimes referred to as MP6.
GPU performance was measured with glmark2-es2 “–off-screen” option.

RAM performance
Why does DDR4 matter? 1320Mhz-DDR4 is 35% faster than 800Mhz-DDR3.
ODROID-N2 DDR4 RAM runs at 1320Mhz.

CPU frequency vs performance
Some ODROID users may recall the lower than expected clock speed in S905.
We ran a test to double check the ratio between CPU clock frequency and performance.
cmd : sysbench cpu –max-cpu-prime=100000 –time=10 –threads=6 run

Thermal characteristics 
To check the thermal throttling, we ran some heavy CPU and GPU loads together on the SoC and monitored temperature. We ran the test within a chamber that keeps the ambient temperature at 35°C.
cmd : stress-ng –cpu 6 –cpu-method matrixprod && glmark2-es2-fbdev –off-screen –run-forever

Gbit Ethernet
According to our iperf test result, the throughput performance was near 1Gbps.

USB 3.0 hosts
We measured the USB transfer speed with a UAS capable SSD.
The average ~340MB/s of throughput should be acceptable for many application.
Since four USB host ports share a single root hub, the transfer rate must be lower if you use multiple USB devices at the same time.

eMMC storage performance
Sequential read and write speed is over 150MB/s and 125MB/s respectively.
4K random access performance is reasonably fast too. iozone test result are as follows.

Micro-SD UHS performance
Using properly implemented UHS dynamic voltage scaling, the sequential read and write speed is over 70MB/s and 55MB/s respectively.

The previous S905 SoC couldn’t activate the UHS mode once the system boots from eMMC. But S922X can keep using the UHS mode with the eMMC module simultaneously.

Sound DAC
ODROID-N2 has an on-board high quality 384Khz/32bit stereo audio line output.
Dynamic range and SNR is near 100dB and Total-Harmonic-Distortion is lower than 0.006%. You can enjoy Hi-Fi sound quality without an external expensive audio DAC.

Signal to Noise Ratio : 1KHz (384KHz, 32bit, 2-ch)

THD + N Ratio : 1KHz (384KHz, 32bit, 2-ch)

Frequency Response : 20Hz – 20KHz(384KHz, 32bit, 2-ch)

SPI Flash memory boot
ODROID-N2 can boot from on-board SPI memory instead of uSD memory or eMMC cards.
The on-board SPI memory is 8MB in size and can include the bootstrap binaries, U-boot, bare minimum Linux kernel, and a ramdisk that includes “Petitboot”. The “Petitboot” software provides a user friendly interface and allows users to select a boot media.
Unfortunately, since the SPI bus on S922X shares the hardware interface with eMMC, the SPI flash memory on ODROID-N2 is only accessible at boot until the eMMC hardware block is activated. So you have to remove eMMC module and boot from a SD card to update firmware in the SPI flash easily.

RTC
ODROID-N2 has an on-board RTC component, NXP PCF8563, interfaced to the I2C bus and can use a backup battery as an alternative power source while the main power source is absent. Since the actually measured power consumption is less than 1uA, the RTC can run for over 10 years with a CR2032 backup battery. Also, this will let your ODROID-N2 wake up at a certain time once you set an alarm time and shutdown it.

Crypto Engine
The ARMv8 architecture supports hardware accelerated crypto extensions for building a secure system. As expected, we could see very decent openSSL performance with ODROID-N2.
cmd: openssl speed sha256 (8KByte)

GPIO (40Pin header)

The N2 GPIO interface is similar to C2 and fully supports a 3.3Volt interface while N1 could only support 2.8Volt IO. This is beneficial for using various peripherals without complicated level shifters.
Another big improvement is a faster SPI bus interface. Its maximum frequency is over 150Mhz, and we will try to implement a DMA driven SPI driver for faster LCD display.

Power consumption
Idle state: 1.6~1.8 Watt
Heavy load state: 5.2~5.3 Watt (stress-ng –cpu 6 –cpu-method matrixprod)
No cables are attached except DC power input and USB-UART debug console cable.

Software support

Linux
An Ubuntu 18.04 LTS image is available with Kernel version 4.9.152 LTS at this moment. This kernel version will be officially supported until Jan, 2023.
A hardware accelerated video decoder (VPU) driver is ready. We have c2player and kplayer examples which can play 4K/UHD H.265 60fps videos smoothly on the framebuffer of ODROID-N2 HDMI output.
The Mali G52 GPU Linux driver works only on the framebuffer. We tested the latest PPSSPP emulation and it can handle x3 scaling on a 4K display nicely with well implemented VSYNC.
There will be a Linux Wayland driver a few months later. We are intensively working on it together with Arm and Amlogic.
Unfortunately, there is no X11 GPU driver since Arm has no plan to support X11 for Bifrost GPUs anymore.
We hope that the Panfrost open source driver can be ported to ODROID-N2 soon.

Android
Android 9 Pie is ready, and we will release a full source code BSP and pre-built image together.
At this moment, Android user land supports only a 32bit system while the Kernel runs in 64bit mode.
We will eventually try to support a 64bit Android system with Vulkan capable GPU driver in a few months.

Availability and price
We will start to sell from very late March and the first shipment will start early April. There is no plan to accept any pre-order.
2GB model: $63
4GB model: $79

Debugging Party
We will send some engineering samples to our friendly community members very soon.
I hope we can ship the samples in this week.

WiKi pages: https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-n2/odroid-n2
Github Kernel: https://github.com/hardkernel/linux/tree/odroidn2-4.9.y
Github u-boot: https://github.com/hardkernel/u-boot/tr … 2-v2015.01

Specification

You can choose between two colors: semi-transparent dark black and clear white.
The price will be only $4. :D

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for ODROID-C1

We’ve released a new Ubuntu 18.04 image for C1 with many useful features. This LTS version will be supported until April of 2023.


Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver with Mate Desktop
OpenGL ES 2.0 driver for Mali 450MP2 GPU
Kernel header package is improved to support the DKMS driver build
OpenGL ES enabled Qt5 library
OpenGL ES enabled SDL library
Kodi 17.6 playback Full-HD H.264 and H.265 video files
“c2play” command line video player compatible
WiringPi GPIO/SPI/I2C/ADC/IRQ library
And many other features

Click this image to see the OS information in detail.  This shows a nice GPU accelerated Qt5 Widget example.

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for ODROID-C1

You can find the OS image link from this official release note.
https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-c1/os_images/ubuntu/v3.0

Ubuntu Minimal image will be available in two weeks later hopefully.

If you are interested in running the mainline Kernel 4.17 or higher, visit this forum thread.

https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=111&t=19292#p226181
As far as I heard, there are some critical issues with display output.

So it is useful only for headless application like a server or IoT area,

Note that we couldn’t find any way to upgrade to 18.04 from 16.04 due to very complicated dependencies.
So you have to backup your important data and freshly flash the OS image.