A cooling fan may be required to prevent “throttling” due to the SoC temperature if the computing load is continuously high at 2. The ODROID N2+ is a great board with a built-in Petitboot bootloader capable of booting from SSDs and other types of devices. If you’re digging around for used hardware and can only find the N2s, don’t worry too much about it.

The “Petitboot” software provides a user friendly interface and allows users to select a boot media. I’ve talked about the N2+ before a bit, in the Battle of the Boards 2023 post, but they’ve recently started taking over as “desktops in my office.Thanks to the modern 12nm silicon technology and a revised silicon design of the S922X SoC, the A73 cores run at 2.

LITTLE architecture which integrates a quad-core ARM Cortex-A73 CPU cluster and a dual core Cortex-A53 cluster with a new generation Mali-G52 GPU.

Havent been able to try Playstation 2 or N64 emulators as there are no binaries for respective emulators for AmLogic devices that I know of yet. The on-board SPI memory is 8MB in size and can include the bootstrap binaries, U-boot, bare minimum Linux kernel, and a ramdisk that includes “Petitboot”. Dhrystone-2, Double-Precision Whetstone, Sysbench and Memory bandwidth benchmark results show the N2+ system performance comes out ahead of other popular ARM SBCs.