Hardkernel have already done a good job at bringing low cost, high performance development boards based on Exynos 4 Quad processor with boards such as ODROID-X, ODROID-U2, or ODROID-X2. But it appears they are not stopping here, and have recently committed code to support ODROID-XU development board based on Exynos 5410, the 8-core big.LITTLE SoC from Samsung, used in devices such as Galaxy S4.
The committed code linked above point the device tree files in arch/arm/boot/dts/ (exynos5410-odroidxu.dts and exynos5410-pinctrl.dtsi) where we can see the board will have 2 GB RAM, and the Cortex A15 cores with be clocked at 1.6 GHz. Exynos5410-odroidxu.dts has been removed from 3.11 branch, so the link above points to an earlier commit.
Exynos 5410 might have been the first big.LITTLE processor ever available, but it comes with a major flaw, as it only supports cluster migration (all 4 Cortex A15 or all 4 Cortex A7 enabled at the same time), whereas big.LITTLE processing also allows for finer control of processors. Samsung recently announced Exynos 5420 that should fix this issue and support Global Task Scheduling. Hopefully, 5410 and 5420 SoCs are pin-to-pin compatible, and ODROID-XU will get an easy upgrade.
Hardkernel is not the only company working working on an Octa-core board, as Insignal is said to be developing the Arndale Octa with Exynos 5410, which was planned for this month. However, considering the state of Arndale forum, and ARMBRIX Zero cancellation, something may not be right at Insignal, and Arndale Octa may never see the light of the day.
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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Thanks for posting it! I was thinking of filing “a tip” this morning. To be more precise, the problem in 5410 is with CCI-400 (Cache Coherent Interface) “that hurt performance and drained battery life” according to other sources. I share with you a hope that they should go for 5420 ASAP.
@davidlt
Thanks for the tip. I saw your comments yesterday, but did not act on it immediately.
There’s an Apache2 (Phoronix Suite) benchmark too – http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1307301-UT-ODROIDXUA40
@cnxsoft ODROID-XU seems to be 4 times faster than Calxeda ECX-1000 1.4Ghz Quad-core ARM server.
@Embedder
I can see Calxeda is about 2.33 times faster (5271.67) http://openbenchmarking.org/index.php?c=result&i=1211037-SU-1210247RA92 compared to ODROID-XU (2256.20). But I guess this type of test might be highly depend on the storage device too.
ODROID-XU has been launched!
http://www.hardkernel.com