First Impressions: Odroid


Android Enclair 2.1 R2 for Odroid Beta (2) released 3/22/2010
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Bugfixes
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1. Voice recording(Audio input) has been implemented.
2. Wrong USB connection while booting up sequence has been fixed.
3. Bluetooth A2DP and high speed data connection has been implemented.
4. LCD PWM(Brightness) issue has been fixed.

http://dev.odroid.com/projects/odroid/download/note/23

Kernel Source 2.6.29
http://dev.odroid.com/projects/linux/download/note/25
Android Source Eclair 2.1 R2
http://dev.odroid.com/projects/android/download/note/24



Also work has been completed on Debian for Odroid
http://dev.odroid.com/projects/debiandroid/
 
I installed Android 2.1. I can connect to wifi but cannot connect to internet. Luckily i installed it on a different microsd.
 
The latest firmware drop was very nice.
Functionality seems to be almost completed.
I could connect to stereo bluetooth headset and enjoyed music.
WLAN connection is also great in my place.
1GByte data space is pretty much bigger(almost 3 times) than Google Nexus-1.

But the market compatibility issues should be fixed.
Anyway, every firmware release has siginificant improvement.
Hardkernel and Corea odroid open source guys are impressive. Right?
 
omega5 said:
The latest firmware drop was very nice.
Functionality seems to be almost completed.
I could connect to stereo bluetooth headset and enjoyed music.
WLAN connection is also great in my place.
1GByte data space is pretty much bigger(almost 3 times) than Google Nexus-1.

But the market compatibility issues should be fixed.
Anyway, every firmware release has siginificant improvement.
Hardkernel and Corea odroid open source guys are impressive. Right?
yea I'm liking the new releases very much. Waiting for the final release of 2.1 to start doing some major modifications to the roms. (making my own tweaks here and there already)

I'm wanting to twist the android market, some of cyanogen's framework, and some emulators to make some custom roms and release them for flashing. We'll see how it goes ;)
 
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omega5 said:
WLAN connection is also great in my place.

Did your internet work right out of the box or did you have to tweak it? I can connect to wifi but not the internet.
 
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rsuryase said:
Did your internet work right out of the box or did you have to tweak it? I can connect to wifi but not the internet.

I didn't change anything after firmware update.

But, there are something strange...
As I know there is co-existence(BT&WLAN interfere each other) problem..
In my house, I should turn off the BT for internet access.
When BT was enabled, I was not able to see any AP.

In my office, I should turn on the BT for internet..
It is very weird.. :(
 
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quadomatic said:
Just curious, but how does the odroid gfx hardware compare to that of the Pandora?
This sounds like a exophase or someone question, I'm not really qualified to answer it but I'll do some quotes from their wiki.

Code:
The S5PC100 adopts a 64-bit internal bus architecture and includes many powerful hardware accelerators for tasks such as motion video
processing, display control and scaling. Integrated Multi Format Codec (MFC) supports encoding and decoding of MPEG4, H.263, H.264 and 
decoding of MPEG2, VC1, Divx/Xvid. This H/W Encoder/Decoder supports real-time video conferencing and Analog TV out for NTSC and PAL mode,
HDMI output for HDTV

Code:
Multi Format CODEC provides encoding and decoding of MPEG-4/H.263/H.264up to 30fps@HD(720p) and decoding of MPEG-2/VC1/Divx/Xvid video up to 30fps@HD(720p)
JPEG codec support up to 30Mpixels/s
3D Graphics Acceleration with Programmable Shaderup to 10M triangles/s (Transform only)
2D Graphics Acceleration with BitBlitand Rotation, up to 40Mpixels/s
1/2/4/8 bpppalletized or 8/16/24bpp non-palletized Color-TFT support up to 2048x2048

More info here http://dev.odroid.com/projects/odroid/wiki/HardwareInformation#s-3

Out of my own curiosity on what NEON was in the cortex A8 after seeing it being implemented in one of the latest betas. Looks pretty interesting, have a look. I never heard this mentioned on the pandora, but seeing how they both have cortex A8 procs it should be the same, but I don't know for sure. Like I said this is a question for a smarter person than myself.
http://www.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/neon.php
http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a/cortex-a8.php?tab=Specifications+

this is what I can scamble together about the pandora from various wiki's and arm website, not really a comparison, I'm not sure which one would win.
Code:
PowerVR SGX530 (110MHz officially) OpenGL ES 2.0 compliant 3D hardware
OMAP3530 - 720 MHz ARM Cortex A8 + PowerVR SGX530 GPU + 520 MHz C64x+ DSP + ISP (Image Signal Processor)
SGX530 (14 MPolys/s, 500Mpx/s@200MHz)for the handheld mobile market
exceeding requirements of OpenGL 2.0 and up to DirectX 10.1 Shader Model 4.1
 
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You can find out every last detail about the S5PC100 GPU from the user's guide:

http://forum.embedde..._UM_REV1.04.pdf

Which is not publicly available so you should probably download it while you can, if you want it.

It'll take me a while more before I feel like I have a really thorough understanding of it vs SGX 530, and of course even then I can totally be wrong. Also, bad drivers for either can be potentially game breaking, although in the case of S5PC100 you could very well write your own drivers using the data in the user's guide. Reading it is actually a pretty insightful look into how a somewhat modern 3D accelerator works.

I guess these are some possible thoughts on comparisons:

Cons vs OMAP3530 SGX530:
- Rendering is not tiled. Color and depth/stencil buffers go through caches, but for this to be effective polygon coverage has to have good locality of reference. You can tile in software, but unfortunately the sizes of the caches aren't listed so you'd have to empirically determine that. They're probably not large enough to make tiling worth it, and I don't think there are any options to make it easy to bin geometry.
- No deferred rendering, also there's no hierarchical-Z or early-Z rejection, so you get the full effects of overdraw (depth test/reject is only performed in raster op stage at the end of the pipeline)
- Although it should be capable of 2 pixel/clock throughput this isn't what's actually rated - for 133MHz one part of the document says 166 and the other 200. My guess is that you don't get 266 because of overhead in the caching and weakness in the memory architecture. What I'm saying is that it could be that the render buffer caches are blocking or don't support hit under miss for loads, ie for depth buffer reads, so when it writes back to the real render buffer it sits around doing nothing for a while. Then the actual performance will depend on how much the depth/stencil cache is retained between polygons, and it could explain why they list two different numbers.
- No threading/latency hiding for shaders. I'm not sure if the two pixel shaders are chained against the same program or not.
- Non-uniform shaders means that vertex shader can't do some things fragment shaders can.
- Seems like the shader support isn't robust - only lists Shader Model 3, only has 512 instruction slots, etc. It does loops but I'm not sure if it handles subroutines.

Pros vs OMAP3530 SGX530:
- Clock speed is listed as 133MHz, as opposed to the OMAP3530 SGX which is capped at 110MHz.
- Has two TMUs instead of one, so can theoretically load over twice as many texels, but of course you perform texture loads redundantly with overdraw with no way to reduce them, so in the end it probably needs more than 2x typically. It does also have a texture cache for each TMU, although without knowing size and associativity for either part I can't really say if this is an advantage.
- Non-uniform shaders gives 1:2 for vertex/fragment shading instead of 2 for both, which means vertex shading doesn't take away from your fragment budget.
- Shaders are much wider (32x4 floating point), so are probably better at vertex shading and good at fragment shading involving HDR effects.
- Pure immediate mode rendering and late testing means you don't pay a price for fragment discard. Same for some other raster ops.

Overall I think the Samsung GPU on S5PC100, with no overdraw eliminating techniques, tiling, and an overall low rated fillrate, is going to be very fill limited compared to the SGX 530. This is going to supersede its strengths. It also probably has fewer image quality related features. But the intriguing thing is that with the user guide all of the low level interface details of the 3D hardware (and some of the operational details) are exposed, which means you can write your own drivers or library code and can get a lot of flexibility out of it. SGX530 on OMAP3530 is currently quite limited by OpenGL ES 2.0, and where it isn't limited some things will be too slow to be useful. This hardware gives you some realistic options for circumventing that. And I'd like to further note that although Samsung does not make the user guide publicly available, there's also nothing in it that indicates that it's confidential material.
 
is there a 25 subscriptions limit on Android YouTube? I have 50 subscriptions but I can only see 25.
 
@exophase- thx for that, had to read it 4 times before it started to set in, you definitely know your stuff ;)

@rsuryase- got the same thing on my android phone, I'm guessing it is an app thing, had to subscribe to a bunch of videos, as I was only subscribed to 3 before :eek:
 
I think I know why my Eclair cannot connect to internet. I have "No service". What do you have as service in your Eclair? How do I get service? My Cupcake has "El Telco Loco" as service, though I don't know how. I can connect to wifi.
 
How's the gaming controls? It looks a bit (actually, very) uncomfortable in landscape mode.
 
Reo said:
How's the gaming controls? It looks a bit (actually, very) uncomfortable in landscape mode.
Odroid is a terrible gaming machine. Most emulators use "virtual" D-pad on the touch screen. The actual D-pad on the ODROID doesn't function well on emulators. I use the odroid as an internet tablet. Better than my Archos 7.
 
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rsuryase said:
Odroid is a terrible gaming machine. Most emulators use "virtual" D-pad on the touch screen. The actual D-pad on the ODROID doesn't function well on emulators. I use the odroid as an internet tablet. Better than my Archos 7.


Most emulators have a configuration menu to change the key map.
For example, run GBA(GameBoid) emulator with a game rom and press M(menu) button and go into "Settings" -> "Key Settings"
Now you can map Odroid keys to GBA keys completely. Note that to activate L/R trigger, set Portrait mode first.
And you also need to disable the virtual key in the menu for full screen game playing with the ACTUAL D-pad. :)
 
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True but the actual D-pad is horrible. You press forward once and the emu behaves as if I'm still pressing it. I don't think the actual D-pad can do diagonal directions when two buttons are pressed at once. The virtual D-pad functions better.
BTW, what do you have service on your Eclair? I have no service, no internet but can connect to wifi.
 
rsuryase said:
True but the actual D-pad is horrible. You press forward once and the emu behaves as if I'm still pressing it. I don't think the actual D-pad can do diagonal directions when two buttons are pressed at once. The virtual D-pad functions better.
BTW, what do you have service on your Eclair? I have no service, no internet but can connect to wifi.

Which emulators? GBA/SNES/NES have no problem and 8-ways of direction also has no problem.

In my school, coffee shops, restaurants and other places I could connect wifi and web browsing.
The only place is my home I couldn't do web browsing.
I found a temporary solution.
Setting -> WiFi Settings -> "M" menu -> Advanced -> Use static IP check
And input IP, DNS and other stuffs manually then I could access web.

I think DHCP is working well but DNS information seems to be wrong in some places.
Try above things and get back to me.

Note that, the DNS problem was not found when I used CupCake.
Do you use cupcake or eclair?
Or you can downgrade only for testing..
 
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