ODROID-XU's ARM big.LITTLE A7 + A15 Octa-Core

The ODROID-XU is the latest exciting ARM development board. Rather than aiming for low-cost like the Raspberry Pi, the ODROID-XU currently offers maximum performance when it comes to open ARM development boards. The ODROID-XU is based on ARM's big.LITTLE design and incorporates a quad-core Cortex-A15 for maximum performance or in its low-power state there's a quad-core Cortex-A7. The ODROID-XU also has with its Samsung Exynos 5 Octa also has a PowerVR SGX544MP3 GPU, 2GB of LPDDR3 memory, and USB 3.0 connectivity.

This week so far I delivered benchmarks of the ODROID-XU and some ODROID-XU tests against Intel and AMD CPUs. In this article is a closer ARM and Intel performance comparison against this Hardkernel development board.

Using the benchmark results from my Samsung A15 Chromebook review, I ran some additional tests on the ODROID-XU system I have remote access to at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

With only having remote access to the system and not owning the ODROID-XU, I didn't take it too far in modifying the ODROID-XU software stack. The ODROID-XU was running Ubuntu 13.10 with the 3.4.5 ARMv7 kernel while the other systems were running Ubuntu 12.10/13.04 for their respective platforms. The comparison hardware for this benchmarking included the OMAP4460 PandaBoard ES, an Intel Atom D525 system, a Calxeda Highbank quad-core node, and the Samsung Chromebook with its Exynos 5 Dual SoC.

All benchmarking for this article was handled via the Phoronix Test Suite. You can compare your own ARM/x86 Linux system's performance against the numbers in this article by simply running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1310222-SO-ARMPERFOR43.