Calxeda ECX-1000 Benchmarks vs. Intel Atom, TI OMAP4

First up, as usual, are the NASA NAS Parallel Benchmarks.

For NPB's Lower-Upper Gauss-Seidel solver, the 1.1GHz Calxeda quad-core node performed well ahead of the OMAP4460 dual-core 1.2GHz processor on the PandaBoard ES. The Atom D525 with its dual-core+HT 1.8GHz x86 configuration was faster than the 1.1GHz quad-core node, but the 1.4GHz quad-core node beat out the older Atom system. Of course, the real story here is the performance-per-Watt, but unfortunately not possible to show for this article due to the aforementioned limitations.

For the "Multi-Grid on a sequence of meshes" test within NPB, the Atom D525 was faster than the two Calxeda nodes tested, but at least the ARM sever vendor was still beating out the TI OMAP4460 PandaBoard ES.

Calxeda's 1.4GHz quad-core ARM configuration was able to beat out the Atom D525 CPU with the Scalar Penta-diagonal solver workload.

With NASA's "Unstructured Adaptive mesh, dynamic and irregular memory access" test, the Atom D525 took another first place finish in at least raw performance -- again the performance-per-Watt is what would really be interesting with the 1.1GHz Calxeda SoC averaging a 4 Watt draw under load while the Atom D525 has a rated TDP of 13 Watts.