ODROID-Magazine-201506

SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER COMPARISON
Comparison
of THE Top 4 SBCs
ONE BOARD TO RULE THEM ALL
by Gary Sims @ www.androidauthority.com
The 2012 release of the original Raspberry Pi created a whole movement
of hobbyists, developers, and educationalists, who used the ARM based
platform to create, hack, and teach. Although the Raspberry Pi wasn’t the
first Single Board Computer (SBC) on the market, it succeeded for three important
reasons. First, it was a full computer on a little board, it had a desktop and
you could write computer programs on it; second, it had a set of user programmable
GPIO pins, similar to those found on microcontroller platforms like the
Arduino; third, and probably most importantly, it only cost $35.
Since then, the SBC market has grown significantly and the Raspberry Pi is no
longer the only choice. Among the popular devices available are the ODROID-
C1, the HummingBoard, the MIP Creator CI20, and the Raspberry Pi 2. Of
course, the list of available boards is much longer, but these are the ones that I
have personally tested.
Comparison in size of all of the single board computers tested
The SBC market is heavily dominated by ARM and three of the four boards
that we will be looking at use ARM based processors. The exception is the Creator
CI20 which uses a MIPS processor. So before we compare the boards, let
me formally introduce you to each one.
Raspberry Pi 2
Although the Raspberry Pi 1 was enormously successful, there was one complaint:
the overall performance of the board was lacking, especially when running
desktop applications. The performance was less than desirable because it
used a single core CPU clock at just 900 MHz. Considering the cost, the innovative
nature of the board, and its versatility, then the performance is perfectly understandable,
but there was room for improvement. That improvement came in
ODROID MAGAZINE 30