When comparing ODROID-W vs The Parallella Board, the Slant community recommends The Parallella Board for most people. In the question“What are the best single-board computers?” The Parallella Board is ranked 18th while ODROID-W is ranked 64th. The most important reason people chose The Parallella Board is:
The Parallella Board makes use of the Epiphany III coprocessor which is invisible to the OS unless directly addressed through its APIs. It currently boasts 32 gigaflops from its 16-core variant with a promise of 100 gigaflops for a 64-core model which will be available in the future.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Software compatible with the Raspberry Pi
ODROID-W is compatible with the Raspberry Pi at least as far as software goes. It can run any software built for the Pi.
Pro Amazing heat dissipation
The ODROID-W has some great heat dissipation. From studying the heat of the heatsink, the maximum temperature registered was 37 degrees Celsius, and that was registered when the board was doing a lot of unpacking through apt-get. Normally the temperature is even lower than that.
Pro Can fit most Pi cases
Since it's built to emulate the Raspberry Pi, it's roughly the same shape albeit a bit smaller. But even then it should be able to fit most Raspberry Pi cases.
Pro Amazing performance because of the Epiphany coprocessor
The Parallella Board makes use of the Epiphany III coprocessor which is invisible to the OS unless directly addressed through its APIs. It currently boasts 32 gigaflops from its 16-core variant with a promise of 100 gigaflops for a 64-core model which will be available in the future.
Pro Low cost Xilinx Zynq FPGA development
Although not a beefy FPGA, the price is right
Pro Excellent many-core RISC architecture
High performance, energy-efficient floating point capable, general purpose RISC cores
Pro Great board for programmers to experiment on different platforms
The Parallella is a great board for programmers to experiment programmin on ARM, FPGA and the Epiphany architecture in one compact package.
Pro Completely open source
Parallella uses open source hardware. The drivers are released as open source as well. All the details about the board designs and schematics can be found on GitHub.
Pro Ships with open source development tools geared towards Epiphany development
Parallella ships with several open source tools geared towards developing for the Epiphany architecture. Some of these tools include a C compiler, Eclipse, OpenCL SDK/compiler and runtime libraries.
Cons
Con Obsolete
Don't fall in love, this model is no longer available.
Con No on-board Ethernet
The ODROID-W has no on-board Ethernet port available, however this can be fixed by using a docking board which has an Ethernet jack.
Con Needs a multi-USB hub
Since it only has a USB host connector available for a full-sized port, you most certainly will need a multi-USB hub to connect more than one external devices to the board.
Con Not great for media streaming
The Parallella board was built to give everyone access to a mini-supercomputer. It's strength lies in the Epiphany which makes it great for parallel computing and image processing, unfortunately it's not good with media (audio and video) streaming.
Con Requires dedicated software development
Since it uses a different architecture than most boards, out-of-the-box software is not compatible with it. Instead, there's a huge GitHub repository with official ports of popular software compatible with the Parallella Board.