ARM Cortex-A15 Quad-Core Linux ODROID-XU Tests

Written by Michael Larabel in Arm on 21 October 2013 at 05:27 PM EDT. 20 Comments
ARM
When the first ARM Cortex-A15 SoCs started rolling out in devices I found the dual-core A15 performance to be crazy fast for ARM and still find the Cortex-A15 performance to be great for low-power devices. Now, however, there's quad-core Cortex-A15 SoCs and even with the big.LITTLE architecture these four A15 cores can be paired with four A7 cores. In this article are our first benchmark results to share of a Samsung Exynos 5 Octa with a 1.6GHz Cortex-A15 configuration paired with a quad-core Cortex-A7 processor.

The Samsung Exynos 5 Octa tests come in the form of the ODROID-XU ARM development platform that';s a bare-board computer built around the ARM big.LITTLE architecture. The ODROID-XU is paired with an Imagination PowerVR SGX544MP3 GPU core, 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM, and USB 3.0 connectivity.

The HPC crew over at MIT -- where we built the 96-core ARM solar-powered super-computer -- allowed me remote access to an ODROID-XU for benchmarking over the next few days. This is my first encounter with the Exynos 5 Octa or any big.LITTLE SoC for that matter.

Only this morning I gained access to the ODROID-XU so many benchmarks are still forthcoming. However, if you're as excited as I to see the results, I've uploaded a teaser at 1310212-SO-ARMQUADCO99. The results in this article are just some standalone reference numbers while plenty more computational test results are forthcoming and comparison to other x86/ARM systems.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite you can compare your own system's performance to these numbers by simply running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1310212-SO-ARMQUADCO99. The tests in that aforelinked result file are also commonly run in other Phoronix articles for reference purposes, like in last week's Intel Core i3 4130 Haswell CPU review that also has numbers from other ARM/Intel CPUs.

Overall the ODROID-XU performance is quite good and this bare-board ARM computer is selling for just $169 USD at HardKernel.com. Stay tuned for more benchmark results and a proper write-up in the coming days. Thanks to Kurt Keville at MIT for the remote access to this ODROID-XU.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week