Saturday 3 August 2013

The big.LITTLE ODROID-XU

One of the community members over at POGS just mentioned that the new ODROID-XU is now available form Hardkernel. Check it out here: http://hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G137510300620

Quite the beefy little ARM unit hosting the new Exynos 5 with 8 cores (4 usable at a time). Essentially it switches between 4 cores that are for light tasks and 4 which are for heavy tasks. Not sure if it's possible to use them all at once, haven't looked into this yet. The whole switching thing is ARM's "big.LITTLE" trademarked design in an attempt to be more energy efficient on mobile devices. The GPU is compliant with OpenCL 1.1 embedded platform profile.

I'm having a serious battle with myself over if I should get it or not. I currently have the ODROID-U2, however, I would like to get my hands on this one because of the GPUs OpenCL 1.1 compliance, albeit only embedded profile as opposed to full. It would allow me to test some OpenCL code I've been playing with for BOINC on an ARM based device.

The problem is that I'm in no position to throw money at new toys. Oh, what to do? Maybe I should wait for something in the same class packing a GPU with full profile OpenCL 1.1 support.