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.
Let's look into the block diagram and the key components on the board to know more about the hardware features.
More detail hardware information in WiKi : https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-c4/hardware/hardware
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 vs performance
Some ODROID users may recall the lower than expected clock speed with ODROID-C2’s S905.
We ran a test to confirm the ratio between CPU clock frequency and performance with ODROID-C4.
Thermal characteristics
To check thermal throttling, we ran some heavy CPU and GPU loads together on the SoC and monitored the temperature. We ran the test within a chamber that maintains 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 you put the ODROID-C4 board into an enclosure, you may encounter some thermal throttling issues when the ambient temperature is higher than 20°C and the continuous computing load is very high.
To minimize the thermal throttling in the enclosure, you need to lower the CPU maximum clock frequency to 1.8Ghz from 2.0Ghz.
Ethernet
According to our iperf test result, the throughput performance was near 1Gbps.
USB Port
We measured the USB3 transfer speed with a USB SSD.
The average ~340MB/s of throughput should be acceptable for many applications.
Since four USB host ports share a single root hub, the transfer rate will be lower if you use multiple USB3 devices at the same time.
There is a separated micro-USB port to support the USB 2.0 OTG dual-roll interface too.
eMMC storage performance
Sequential read and write speed is over 165MB/s and 125MB/s respectively.
4K random access performance is reasonably fast too. iozone test results 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 50MB/s respectively.
Cryptography
The ARMv8 architecture supports hardware accelerated crypto extensions for building a secure system. As expected, we could see very decent openSSL performance with ODROID-C4.
GPIO (40Pin Header)
The ODROID-C4 GPIO interface is similar to 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 over 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 relatively very low.
Therefore, we can enjoy a quiet and powerful computer with high energy efficiency.
Idle state: ≃ 1.8 Watt
Heavy load state: 3.1~3.3 Watt (stress-ng --cpu 4 --cpu-method matrixprod)
No cables are 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.
Software support
Linux
An Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (full 64bit) image is available with Linux kernel version 4.9.218 LTS as of April 22, 2020. This LTS kernel version will be officially supported until Jan, 2023. A hardware accelerated video decoder (VPU) driver is ready. We have c2play and kplayer examples which can play 4K/UHD H.265 60fps videos smoothly on the framebuffer of ODROID-C4’s HDMI output. The Mali G31 GPU Linux driver works only on the framebuffer too.
Upstream Linux kernel 5.4 is also available for edge breeding developments with supporting ARM Mali GPU accelerated. WebGL content can run on the Firefox browser (v75+) using the modern Wayland/GBM backend. However, the VPU acceleration is a “Work in Progress”. The modern Wayland powered Ubuntu 20.04 GNOME Desktop is running quite well.
The Flutter UI framework powered with Upstream Linux kernel 5.4 and ARM Mali GPU accelerated, the Home Automation example is supplied as a real world embedded Linux system development reference.
Here is a demo video with Ubuntu 20.04 Minimal + Linux kernel 5.4 + Flutter UI + direct GPIO access
፠ Upstream Linux kernel 5.4 is still in work-in-progress but will keep updating.
Android
Android 9 “Pie” 64bit is available, and we will release a full source code BSP and pre-built image together. Android user land supports 32bit as well as 64bit applications with a Vulkan capable ARM Mali GPU driver. Another big improvement is to support the AndroidThings compatible framework, this will provide an easy development environment to control hardware peripherals on Android with powerful Java.
፠ ODROID-C4 is not a Google AndroidThings certified device and Hardkernel’s Android source code does not include the Google AndroidThings source code.
Android 64bit and Vulkan GPU driver demo with PPSSPP “God of War” emulation
Android IoT programming with Android Things compatible APIs
LineageOS
Yet another community driven OS, LineageOS 16.0, is available as of April 22, 2020. LineageOS 17.1 is being developed and the very first version would be available in the middle of May, 2020.
CoreELEC
CoreELEC development team supplies a great OS image for playing 4K/UHD contents with HDR colors.
It is a ‘Just enough OS’ Linux distribution based on Kodi technology for popular Amlogic hardware.
4K HDR + Audio Pass-through, Netflix 1080p and even 8K-30FPS H.265 video playback is possible with downscaling.
Availability and price
ODROID-C4 is currently available for sale, and orders are being accepted. We will start shipping from 28 April.
4GB model: $50
https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-c4/
I hope other worldwide distributors will start selling soon.
BTW, we will send some engineering samples to our community developers soon to play with the new exciting platform altogether.
Where is ODROID-C3?
We’ve internally developed the ODROID-C3 based on the S905X2 CPU which has ARM Cortex-A53 cores almost two years ago.
But the performance was not enough and we had heard about the new coming S905X3 with modern ARM Cortex-A55 cores. Therefore, we decided to skip the ODROID-C3.
How about ODROID-C2/C1+?
We will endeavour to try and continue the production of ODROID-C2/C1+ for as long as possible as there are still many B2B customers who continue to purchase these in quantity. However, Amlogic is discontinuing the old S905 and S805 CPUs in the near future and as a result we will likely have to discontinue ODROID-C2/C1+ early next year. Please consider switching to the new ODROID-C4 platform as soon as possible.
