ARM Cortex-A9 PandaBoard ES Benchmarks

[curaga]

I should add, it's very likely TI subsidizes that, so the real price would be more than 189$. They are known to have done so in the past with their dev boards.

[AnonymousCoward]

Thanks Michael, it's great to have some good ARM numbers.



Not in perf/$. For 189$ you can get an E-450.

I agree. It's not competitive not from a price/performance nor from a price/features point of view. The Raspberry Pi (US$25 to $35) looks much more interesting especially if they can get it to run XBMC.

[Blades]

diff --git a/arch/arm/mach-omap2/id.c b/arch/arm/mach-omap2/id.c
--- a/arch/arm/mach-omap2/id.c
+++ b/arch/arm/mach-omap2/id.c
@@ -231,7 +231,7 @@ static void __init omap4_check_features(void)
case 1:
default:
/* Standard device */
- omap_features |= OMAP4_HAS_MPU_1_2GHZ;
+ omap_features |= OMAP4_HAS_MPU_1_5GHZ;
break;
}
}

The above is a patch that will run the 4460 at 1.5ghz, replacing the 1.2ghz state. Pretty easy to see what I did is just fudge a board id check.. I put a GPU memory heatsink on the thing just for safety... I tried to drop the mv down to 1350 instead of 1375... but did it quick, and probably missed quite a bit of loose ends.. and thus that was fail..

Thermal throttling is pretty annoying when compiling a kernel.. ./kern/drivers/staging/thermal_framework/governor/omap_die_governor.c has the goods for the whens and whats of that.. The actual temp sensor (sysfs) readout is quite different from what the thermal throttling setup repots as values (in kmsg when certain temp reached).. so... thats a bit odd.. temp1_input seems to be more realistic.

Currently, this setup is painful.. Lots of glitchy things happening with X when using the latest pvr crap.. unity is... unity.. but even worse when such tomfoolery is going on.. For anyone who is setting their PB-ES up now, save yourself the time and pain -- and move the rootfs off of the sd card and onto nfs, usb-stick, usbhdd.. whatever.. just not the SD.. I don't care if its class 20000x mega-super.. it sucks.. morse code has more iops..

[alchark]

Hardfloat?

Michael,

Could you please also run a comparison of an ARM softfloat vs. hardfloat userlands? The standard softfloat solution has a huge performance overhead for EVERY single floating point instruction, which unnecessarily disadvantages the processor in comparison to x86. Also, various FPU options may be of interest (neon, vfp).

Thanks!

[Blades]

erm.. I'm probably doing something wrong/off.. but for comparison's sake..

7-Zip 9.20 Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov 2010-11-18
p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=C.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,2 CPUs)

RAM size: 641 MB, # CPU hardware threads: 2
RAM usage: 425 MB, # Benchmark threads: 2

Dict Compressing | Decompressing
Speed Usage R/U Rating | Speed Usage R/U Rating
KB/s % MIPS MIPS | KB/s % MIPS MIPS

22: 1097 139 767 1067 | 25756 199 1166 2325
23: 1105 154 730 1126 | 25525 200 1170 2337
24: 1095 146 808 1177 | 25146 199 1171 2333

and.. i forgot to turn off a swap partition I had enabled on the sd card.. so I ran it again..

7-Zip 9.20 Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov 2010-11-18
p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=C.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,2 CPUs)

RAM size: 641 MB, # CPU hardware threads: 2
RAM usage: 425 MB, # Benchmark threads: 2

Dict Compressing | Decompressing
Speed Usage R/U Rating | Speed Usage R/U Rating
KB/s % MIPS MIPS | KB/s % MIPS MIPS

22: 1112 153 708 1081 | 25799 200 1165 2329
23: 1106 154 732 1127 | 25574 200 1172 2341
24: 1102 156 757 1185 | 24896 197 1170 2310

[gururise]

Hey Michael,

Love the ARM articles! Would love for you to go more in-depth on the ARM architecture. Some ideas would include:

- Soft Float vs VFP.
- NEON vs VFP
- All of the above vs x86 (Atom)
- Power consumption of mainboard/cpu only (arm vs atom).

I know some of the benchmarks may be a bit tricky, especially considering Ubuntu 11.10 lacks good arm support; however, maybe with the latest GCC and kernel, some of these tests may become viable. Knowing what the performance limitations of the ARM core vs Atom and the power consumption of the ARM dev board vs. an Atom (ie N510) would be very interesting!

[josmala]

There is something seriously wrong with these arm benchmarks.

The phoronix got 1154 DMIPS out of their pandaboard with their dhrystone benchmark (DMIPS=dhrystone score/1575) . ARM got 2075 DMIPS out of their 830mhz single core. These benchmarks are also discussed in realworld tech forums, and someone there got 2.5 times phoronix result on the 7zip benchmark on equivalent 1.2Ghz dual core cortex A9. (exynos based). So maybe the operating system didn't get all the drivers right and runs it at fraction of real clockspeed.

[Blades]

The phoronix got 1154 DMIPS out of their pandaboard with their dhrystone benchmark (DMIPS=dhrystone score/1575) . ARM got 2075 DMIPS out of their 830mhz single core. These benchmarks are also discussed in realworld tech forums, and someone there got 2.5 times phoronix result on the 7zip benchmark on equivalent 1.2Ghz dual core cortex A9. (exynos based). So maybe the operating system didn't get all the drivers right and runs it at fraction of real clockspeed.

Well, fwiw.. the kernel included in the 11.11 linaro 'distro' had my pandaboard-es running at a smoking 920mhz.. I don't know if this is the case with the latest bundled kernels - as that inspired me to get the source and attain the proper clock speed in any way I could... so, its possible something like that is going on - that and running everything off of the sd card is awful (from a usability standpoint) - I wouldn't be surprised to impact benchmarks in ways you wouldn't think of..

[ldesnogu]

- NEON vs VFP

NEON isn't a replacement for VFP as it doesn't support IEEE754. In particular no double precisions and just one rouding mode. ARMv8 ISA will have proper IEEE754 SIMD instructions.

[ssvb]

BTW, here are my benchmark results from gentoo (hardfp) running on origenboard (dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 @1.2GHz): http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1...AR-1112277AR91