NVIDIA Tegra K1 Compared To AMD AM1 APUs

This weekend when publishing preview benchmarks of NVIDIA's Tegra K1 from the Jetson TK1 development board, there were numerous requests by Phoronix readers to see this high-end ARM SoC pitted against the new AMD AM1 APUs. In this article are some benchmarks of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on all of the AM1 Athlon and Sempron APUs compared to the Tegra K1 Cortex-A15 SoC.

Like this weekend's tests, the benchmarks in this article are primarily CPU bound as I'm still ready some ARM-compatible graphics and OpenCL tests. Those should be ready soon along with some power consumption numbers. Thus in this article it's mostly a comparison of the AM1 APUs with their dual and quad AMD "Jaguar" x86 cores compared to the Tegra K1 with its quad-core-plus-one Cortex-A15 configuration.

All of the systems in this article were running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS but the AMD hardware had the benefit of being able to use the newer Linux kernel while the Tegra K1 with its Ubuntu image is currently bound to the Linux 3.10 kernel, but Jetson TK1 support is being queued up right now for linux-next.

The Tegra K1's four Cortex-A15 cores top out at a reported 2.39GHz compared to 2.05GHz for the high-end AMD Athlon 5350 x86 quad-core. The Jetson TK1 is also bound to using 2GB of memory and was using its onboard 16GB eMMC memory compared to the AM1 hardware; so there's some slight differences, but overall it's about as much of a direct comparison as we can do considering the platform differences. GCC 4.8.2 as shipped by Ubuntu 14.04 LTS works great on both x86 and ARMv7.

All of this Linux ARM and x86 performance benchmarking was handled in a fully-automated manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.