Welcome to the first look video for the Libre Computer Board ALL-H3-CC. In this video we will be going over the hardware features of the board and comparing them to the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. We will have a full review going over the software features of the board once the software bits are released.
This board is designed to be form factor compatible with cases built for the Raspberry Pi 3. It features the same external connectors, placement, and board thickness for nearly complete compatibility.
It offers the same external connectors like 4 USB ports, RJ45 ethernet, CVBS AV jack with composite video and stereo audio out, HDMI out Interface, MicroUSB Power input, 40 pin GPIO header, and MicroSD card slot.
Unlike the Raspberry Pi 3, this board has no onboard wifi or bluetooth so we recommend using a USB dongle. They generally offer better compatibility, higher performance, and only cost a few bucks. It has a DVP camera interface that is compatible with cameras from Orange Pi. You can also use USB webcams which are very well supported in software. The other missing feature is the DSI connector for the Raspberry Pi 7 Inch Touchscreen. In leiu of that, you get a HDMI 1.4 interface that supports 4k at 30 frames.
Now lets go over the features that this board brings to the table. This board offers an onboard microphone, separate UART header for serial console, IR receiver, DVP connector for camera sensors, and eMMC 4.x connector on the reverse side for superfast storage up to 128GB.
Lets compare the Raspberry Pi 3 and ALL-H3-CC side by side. The Raspberry Pi 3 has quad 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 cores running at 1.2GHz. The ALL-H3-CC has three variants with 512MB IoT, 1GB, and 2GB. The first two variants have quad 32-bit ARM Cortex-A7 cores running at 1GHz and the 2GB variant has quad 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 cores with the optional Crypto extensions running at 1GHz. It is 20x faster than the Raspberry Pi 3 for encryption and decryption workloads. The 512MB and 1GB model has a power consumption profile slightly lower than the Raspberry Pi 3 while the 2GB model is similar to the Raspberry Pi 3. The 2GB model has twice the memory and this is a huge boost for running applications that requires faster and/or more memory.
Another IO issue to mention is that the Raspberry Pi 3 shares bandwidth between the Ethernet and all four USB ports. You are limited to 280Mb or 35MB/s of aggregated bandwidth. That means if you are copying files from one drive to the other, the fastest you can do it is at 18MB/s. On the ALL-H3-CC, every port has its own channels. That means you can have up to 4 times the amount of bandwidth going through multiple hard drives than you could on the Raspberry Pi 3. The GPU can decode H.264 H.265 codecs at 4K although some profiles and bitrate streams are not supported.
And that should be all for the hardware aspects of the board. This board becomes very interesting because the anticipated retail cost of the 2GB model is the same as the Raspberry Pi 3 with 1GB of RAM. Memory or IO intensive programs run much faster which allows for new applications that weren't possible on the Raspberry Pi 3. You can re-use most of the accessories you've purchased and swap the board along with the software. This board has a large upstream community and can run a variety of Linux distributions and Android 7 Nougat.