Radxa Rock and ODROID-U3 Quad Core Development Boards Comparison

If you want a quad core development board for less than $100, you only have two choices right now: Radxa Rock powered by Rockchip RK3188, and Hardkernel ODROID-U3 powered by Samsung Exynos 4412 prime. There are also a few Freescale i.MX 6Q boards such as Wandboard Quad and UDOO Quad for around $130 which you could consider because of potentially better software support and features like SATA, but in this post, I’ll compare Radxa Rock and ODROID-U3 to help you decide which one may be right for your application or project.

Let’s get right to the subject, with a side-by-side comparison table.

When it comes to raw processing power including CPU, GPU, and RAM, both development boards are equivalent, although ODROID-U3 has a tiny edge, it won’t be noticeable. Radxa Rock comes with 8GB internal flash, whereas ODROID-U3 has none. You can either boot with a microSD card, or purchase an 8GB eMMC module ($25) for optimal I/O performance.

Radxa Rock has more built-in features such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, optical S/PDIF, a microphone, and composite output, so if you need any of these, the Rockchip board may be better for you, although you could had external hardware to provide most of these to the ODROID-U3 board.

ODROID-U3 has only 8 I/O accessible via one expansion, although you can augment that with U3-IO Arduino compatible expansion board. Radxa Rock has a clear edge here with two 40-pin headers giving access to a wide range of I/O. Having said that I’m not sure they are all accessible at this stage due to driver issues. GPIO and I2C is working, but I’ve read there may be issues with SPI for example.

I haven’t really tested Android, nor Linux distributions on either device, but Android support should be decent on both devices, simply because both SoC are quite mature. Radxa Rock has a slight edge here because it supports Android 4.2.2 instead of Android 4.1.2 on ODROID-U3, which may really be important if you absolutely need support for some new features introduced in 4.2. You should be able to run all sort of Linux distributions on both board, but ODROID-U3 should probably be better here because of GPU and VPU acceleration support. Of course, if you’re going to use the board as a server, it won’t matter. The Linux kernel is quite old for RK3188 (3.0.x) whereas ODROID-U3 uses a more recent 3.8.x kernel.  Support is likely to be better for ODROID-U3, at least for now, simply because Hardkernel ODROID-U(2)((3) boards have been around a longer time, and more people are using them so the community is larger, whereas Radxa Rock is newer, and issues may be more difficult to fix at first.

The total shipped price for Radxa Rock is about $115, whereas ODROID-U3 “community edition” costs $84, so with a $30 price different, ODROID-U3 appears to be the clear winner here. It’s not as simple as that, as you really have to look at your project, and depending on the required features, cost may add-up quite a bit with ODROID-U3. For example, adding the enclosure, 8GB eMMC flash, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi brings the total price to $129 which costs more than Radxa Rock.

Both Radxa Rock and ODROID-U3 have their own strengths and limitations, and as always, you have to select the board that matches your application or project best.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

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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