A New MIPS Creator CI20 Is Running Much Better

Since I haven't had any other MIPS systems for Linux benchmarking, going into the CI20 benchmarking I really wasn't sure what to expect out of this board's performance. With the CI20 running Debian GNU/Linux 7 with the Linux 3.0 kernel and GCC 4.6.3, I compared the performance to the results from some other recent low-power Linux device testing. The software stacks vary a bit across hardware, but still should be good enough for setting performance expectations for the Ingenic JZ4780.

The devices for this comparison were an Intel NUC with Celeron N2820 "Bay Trail" SoC, Intel Compute Stick with Atom Z3735F "Bay Trail" SoC, Intel NUC with Core i3 5010U "Broadwell" processor, a CompuLab Utilite with i.MX6 quad-core Cortex-A9 SoC, and NVIDIA's Jetson TK1 development board with Tegra K1 32-bit SoC.

All of these x86 / ARM / MIPS benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and standardized manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite.

For John The Ripper's Blowfish, the MIPS CI20 was a bit less than half the performance of the NVIDIA Tegra K1.

The CI20 isn't a great choice for x264 video encoding, perhaps for lack of customized tuning for MIPS32?