Insignal recently announced that Arndale Octa with an Exynos 5420 was available for pre-order with shipping expected in December 2013, making it the first company providing a low cost big.LITTLE development board. But there will be some competition as Hardkernel will launch ODROID-XU2 also based on Samsung Exynos 5420 octa-core processor according to a tweet by SamsungExynos official twitter account. The board is also briefly mentioned in an article in Samsung website as it was showcased at ARM Techcon 2013.
That’s actually all the information I have. There’s a brochure on ARMFlix’s video, but it’s unreadable. However, we can derive (guess) some of the specifications based on the picture above and ODROID-XU specs:
- SoC – Samsung Exynos 5420 octa core SoC with 4x Cortex A15 cores up to 1.8 GHz, 4x Cortex A7 cores up to 1.3 GHz in big.LITTLE configuration, and ARM Mali T-628 MP6 GPU
- System Memory – N/A, but likely to be 2 GB (like ODROID-XU) or 3 GB RAM (like Arndale Octa).
- Storage – micro SD slot, eMMC 4.5 connector
- Video Output – micro HDMI + MPI LCD interface and Touch screen I2C ports (At the back of the board, not seen on pic) + DisplayPort (Bottom left)
- Audio – micro HDMI, headphone jack, audio codec
- Connectivity – 10/100M Ethernet via USB 2.0
- USB – 1x USB 3.0 Host, 1x USB 3.0 OTG, and 4x USB 2.0 Host
- Expansion Header – 30 pins (GPIO/IRQ/SPI/ADC)
- Misc – PWM connector for Cooler, backup battery connector, serial console (UART) connector, and PMIC.
Price is unknown at this time. For reference ODROID-XU is available for $169 + shipping, so this new board is likely to be slightly more expensive once it becomes available in Q1 2014.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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How does this compare to the low end Intel-based boards for performance? Price is getting similar, eg
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/I3-2100T-MINI-PC/1115431494.html
Not applicable to this post, but I have no idea how to otherwise get a message to cnxsoft.
Apparently the coupon code AFFM7 for focalprice is no longer valid. Guess it should be removed from the page.
@onebir. The Intel stuff has much more performance per dollar. The main point of these boards is power and size: Odroid-U2 for example is roughly 5x5x5cm and you can use it without any active cooler. A perfect fit for a small home server that stays on 24/7 and sips a total of one or two watts on idle.
@onebir
Here is another better priced one:
I wonder about the CPU’s speed however?
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/2GB-DDR3-8GB-SSD-Mini-PC-i7-Intel-Core-U620-High-Speed-Windows-2008-as-Mini/1367484608.html
Ordering as soon as it’s available. Still, we need those 64-bit Exynos 6 CPUs (14nm FinFET) with A53/A57. It’s since that Samsung already announced 64-bit Exynos for 2014 and there will be two version. One with official ARM cores (A53/A57) then Samsung will followup with custom built cores (Qualcomm-like). They also talked about 10nm already. I hope dreams come true and we get 14nm FinFET 64-bit Exynos 6 early in 2014 and dev boards in H2 probably :/
intel h61 you can hackintosh it it works very well with mountain lion but for that price is it good
@onebir @other_anon For applications that support multiple core, the performance should be similar. Phonorix tested ODROID-XU (Exynos 5410) against a PC powered by Intel Atom D525, and the Exynos 5410 easily beats the Atom processor for all tests. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=arm_odroidxu_octa&num=2 Intel Core i3 2100T is faster than Atom D525, so I assume it would probably match Exynos 5410 is these particular benchmarks. However for single thread performance, Intel Core i3 should still have a clear lead over the Cortex A15. Beside performance, the most important point is that the Intel Box is just ready to use for end users, whereas Hardkernel… Read more »
@FransM
You can normally contact via http://www.cnx-software.com/contact-us/ (Link at the top), but yesterday it may not have worked as I played around with plugins.
Thanks for the feedback. I’ll look for a new coupon code for Focalprice.
@Joe Bucks
Whoah – at that price, if it’s really i7, clock speed’s hardly an issue!
@Joe Bucks
@onebir
This Core i7 CPU is not really a performance beast, and is equivalent to a Core2 Duo E6600 @ 2.40GHz
http://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7+U+620+%40+1.07GHz
http://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Duo+E6600+%40+2.40GHz&id=912
So still the performance is better than Atom based system, so the price looks good ($200 with shipping by courier). There’s another seller with a better rating that sells a similar system with more RAM (4GB) but no storage for $180 with shipping by HK post. http://www.aliexpress.com/item/PC-Desktop-Barebone-Mini-Barebone-PCs-with-intel-dual-core-i7-U620-1-07Ghz-8-usb/1355766588.html
Why are these boards coming out so late? Does it really take such a long time to do them or does Samsung only supply their “Mercedes” chips to this hobbyist niche, once they no longer have any use for them in their own smartphones and tablets? With 64-Bit ARM chips supposed to be just around the corner these extened 32-bit ARM15 seem to be dead unless there was a really good price argument, yet I can’t see Samsung addressing the RK3188 market with Exynos 5. So who will really want these board now? (I know I would have stood in… Read more »
@Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)
Oops – didn’t even know there was an i7 processor that was so much less powerful than most of them!
Looks identical to the XU, probably just dropped in the new SoC and called it a day.
@Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)
This may sound stupid,but what is the purpose of manufacturing a new high end
processor like the Intel I7 with such mediocre processing power?
@Joe Bucks
Sorry I have not explanation. I don’t follow Intel that much, but apparently it’s supposed to work as follows:
* Core i3 – low-level performance
* Core i5 – mid-range performance
* Core i7 – high-end performance
However that i7 processor has lower performance than most of the Core i3 processors.
@Thomas Hoberg The way I understand it, there is a time period that must pass after the release of a new SoC by Samsung before any company that is planning on releasing a device using that SoC is allowed to release their product (something like 6 months). It’s possible that ARM might be twisting Samsung’s arm (lolpun!) to allow Insignal and Hardkernel to release their 5420 board before that time period is up given the supposed CCI-400 bug of the 5410 SoC (even if the CCI-400 bug doesn’t keep the 5410 from running in true HMP mode, ARM would rather… Read more »
@mjstanton
Just a comment about 64-bit… Initially, I thought the same, that it would be useless in smartphone for now because device are not using 4GB or more RAM, but there’s more to the move from ARMv7 to ARMv8 (increase in the number of general purpose registers, doubles the number of FP/NEON registers, hardware AES,…) than meets the eye, as Anandtech found out in their review of the iPhone5s: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/4
@Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)
Exactly! People don’t think that it’s a completely new ISA, double registers, double precision support in NEON, etc. It’s almost like a new chip, but still compatible in AArch32 mode for ARMv7. Currently we have 3GB RAM max in smartphones, but 4GB also coming.
@mjstanton I don’t believe the A53/57 are purpose built for the data center. They are building blocks, which can be used individually or together depending on your use case. For starters, there wouldn’t be an A53 companion in the datacenter incarnation of ARMv8, because in a Moonshot enclosure full with A57s you’d just turn off the ones you don’t need at the moment. At the same time you see the Altera FPGAs produced on Intels 14nm process using ARM53 exclusively, because on these chips they aren’t used for compute workloads, but for administration/programming of the FPGAs. This BIG/little combination though… Read more »
@davidlt
Why to order this, if its already outdated? (64-bit boards coming out sooner than Q1 2014)
There is already 5420 board, no need to wait if you really want to buy that EOL