Good afternoon, dear readers!

It is strange that there has not yet been a short news about this, so I will undertake to write. Last week, the company Hardkernel, familiar mainly with the production of dev-motherboards based on arm processors from different manufacturers (mainly Samsung Exynos and Amlogic, but they also had a full analogue of the RPi of a smaller format, which they were firmly pressed into). Odroid-C2 based on the 64-bit ARM S905 processor from Amlogic.



Despite the fact that the official site about the new board has not yet said anything, all the information about it is already available. And the fact that the board is developed and debugged, and is half a step from production, is quite obvious. As well as the fact that pre-orders opened at the beginning of March in a month will already start to be delivered. Therefore, without delay
details:
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Well, about the Gikovsky gland and the Gikovsky story, here it is, all that techno-porn that was written on the forum by a company representative, and some personal impressions (from the living specimen on the hands) at the very end.

ODROID-C2 is a 64-bit four-processor single-board computer, one of the most efficient 64-bit computers for developers currently available in the ARM world.
It will be available for purchase on March 2, 2016 at a price of $ 40. Mass production will begin on February 15th, the first shipments on March 4th.

Specifications:

Amlogic S905 (ARM® Cortex®-A53 (ARMv8) 2Ghz quad core CPU)
2Gbyte DDR3 SDRAM
ARM Mali ™ -450 MP3 GPU (OpenGL ES 2.0 / 1.1 for Linux and Android)
HDMI 2.0 4K / 60Hz display
H.265 4K / 60FPS and H.264 4K / 30FPS capable VPU
Gigabit ethernet
40 + 7pin GPIO port
eMMC5.0 HS400 Flash Storage slot / UHS-1 SDR50 MicroSD slot
USB 2.0 Host x 4, USB 2.0 OTG x 1 (power + data capable)
Infrared (IR) Receiver
Ubuntu 16.04 and Android 5.1 Lollipop based on Kernel 3.14 LTS
Dimensions identical to ODROID-C1 +

Block diagram:



Main components:



Additional information about iron:

One of the new features of ODROID-C2 is SD 3.01 - a card reader compatible with the UHS-1 MicroSD standard, which many people wanted and asked for. As well as a faster eMMC controller and module, which can be ordered with ODROID-C2, and will be equipped with pre-installed Ubuntu.
There is also a 40 + 7 pin GPIO. It includes the functions of PWM, I2C, I2S, UART, ADC and the GPIO itself.

A brief comparison of the specifications of boards that you can buy for comparable money ($ 40):



Performance:

The manufacturer launched several different tests for measuring computing power and comparison on Ubuntu 16.04, on different boards: Pi 2, ODROID-C1, ODROID-U3 and ODROID-XU4.



Or here are the results of the Antutu test on Android:



ODROID-C2 issues about 33700pts, while ODROID-C1 + shows approximately 21200pts for comparison. Notice that the XU4 reaches 51000pts, thanks to the much faster A15 cores and GPUs of the Mali-T628 MP6 chip with 6 cores. But it is worth while almost two and a half times more expensive. So ODROID-C2 is the undisputed leader in price / performance ratio.

Network connection:

On board the C2 is a gigabit network adapter. Bidirectional speed test showed approximately 900Mbps. Thanks to the double dispatch buffer in S905, the order speed doubled. Now this is a full gigabit adapter.



HDMI 2.0 and video playback:

The board supports 4K / 60Hz HDMI 2.0 output and gives you the opportunity to work in the magnificent UHD 3840x2160 resolution. But, unfortunately, not as fast as I would like. Rendering noticeably slows down.
Therefore, Android used the ability to multiplex the interface layer in the FHD 1920x1080 GUI and the video layer in UHD 3840x2160, which allows you to work quickly and in high resolution.
The same approach may be applied to Linux in the future.
The same approach is used in the latest Kodi Jarvis-RC2 media harvester, preinstalled in Android, and allows you to achieve the same results right now.

Perhaps I will skip the screenshots in 4K, but if someone really needs, then here are the links to them:
dn.odroid.com/homebackup/20160203/scr1.png
dn.odroid.com/homebackup/20160203/scr2.png

Additionally:

1. No SPI bus. The S905 chip is simply not there. Additional SPI accessories unfortunately will not work with C2.
2. Missing RTC. In the S905 it is again just not there. Perhaps the company will make an additional fee with this functionality.
3. Incorrect alpha blending fixed in S905. No more need to use DDX blending as a workaround.
4. The public version of the S905 specification will be released in March or April.
5. Ubuntu 16.04 (LTS) ARM64 and still very early, and not quite ready for ARM64. It lacks some packages, such as Chromium. It is quite difficult to build for this architecture, and apparently no one has yet succeeded.
6. Ubuntu / Linux Mali GPU driver is only in the form of fbdev. The X11 version will be available in March or later in April.
7. OS images and build instructions are already available on WiKi from http://odroid.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=en:odroid-c2
8. Prototypes were sent to community enthusiasts who proved their usefulness with pleasant and interesting developments for the company's products.

My personal impression:

And starting from the 8th point, which by the way is the last in the whole announcement on the forum, if you have read it, there is nothing further, I can say that I am one of those who received the prerelease sample. I once wrote codecs for Exynos MFC, so that Kodi could display hardware hard on many hardkernel boards, for which the company that sent me all the samples of their new products for the year, for which many thanks to her. The sample has already arrived at my post this Friday.
What can I say from my personal impressions: first, what was not mentioned or mentioned casually in the announcement - now there is a full-sized HDMI on the board. No more hassle with micro-hdmi, especially if this is the first hardkernel card you bought. It is terrible to remember how much I steamed once with U2 while I found this wire. The product itself, in my opinion, is one of the most complete releases of the company. It works almost everything now. And the fact that it does not work is just not ready for arm64, but this is not a big problem. GPU drivers started up without any complaints. The video codec also did not cause any problems. Everything works very fast. What I particularly liked was the working hotplug CPU governor, disabling the processors that are not used, and lowering the hertz. The last so working governor was in U2 / U3, then there were only those who worked with Hertzovka.
I don’t have 4K, I don’t have to see how cool it is, and I don’t need to. I hardly notice the difference between 720p and 1080p, the TV is big, but I'm not sitting too close. So this geek feature passes me by.
Divine black board color. It looks very cool, such a small anthracite. Stylish. Very good regular radiator. There is no cheap plastic cooler that spoils the impression with its noise on -XU? boards.
Another of the fact that they did not mention - the power connector is similar to C1, i.e. This is such a small pin, I do not know what kind of connector it is, but I have only one such wire, which is rather inconvenient. It turns out that included either this or that. The power consumption is apparently exactly the same, that is, there is enough USB connector. The board has never slipped and never passed out from the same source that feeds C1, although I drove it hard.

If, in turn, about the bad, then, in the opinion that I have developed, most of the problems arise from the total unreadiness of software to arm64. I had to specifically correct the same Kodi in order to simply assemble. Same with the amllibs libraries. And all the improvements are the most banal disorder of developers who wrote their software completely confident that the size of the pointer is 32 bits. All errors come from castes (void *) (unsigned int), thank God the compiler warns about this directly. Although, of course, there are more exotic options, but all the same, all in the end boil down to the fact that there used to be an int here, and now a long one. And, nevertheless, technically - this product is very cool right at the start. And I like it very much, considering that I was pretty cool about C1. True, the missing RTC is certainly a little discouraging. After each power outage, the board needs a time server to remember which year it is now, of course, it is not at any gate for DYI devices.

No problem, I will answer questions if you are interested in something specific that I can see or measure on the board. Despite the fact that this is an engineering sample, it looks very, very "release" and is unlikely to be very different in the version that will be supplied to consumers.

Well, a photo of my sample, along with the very Kodi with which I most of all have to deal on these boards.