8 ms·

Ubuntu on ARM faster than some Atoms?

45 points by tankenmate 15y ago

rbanffy 15y ago
Interesting. I use an Atom-based netbook as my home machine and it always felt "fast enough" (up to the point it hits its disk, which is really slow). Now I want a new computer. BTW, the Atom N270 they are benchmarking was launched in 2008. They picked more or less the slowest Intel processor available. http://ark.intel.com/products/36331/Intel-Atom-Processor-N270-%28512K-Cache-1_60-GHz-533-MHz-FSB%29 http://ark.intel.com/products/36331/Intel-Atom-Processor-N27...
- Symmetry 15y ago
  Also, the N270 is two threads, instead of the 2 cores the author claims. I'd be really interested in seeing a better benchmark detailing what parts of which core are the fastest. My impression has always been that the A9 has really good execution resources compared to the Atom and can roast it in micro benchmarks, but that the better memory hierarchy of the Atom wins out in typical applications.
- sciurus 15y ago
  Agreed, it would have made more sense to test again the N455, which is common in netbooks shipping now, or its replacement the N2600. http://ark.intel.com/compare/36331,49491,58916 http://ark.intel.com/compare/36331,49491,58916
- brudgers 15y ago
  It also appears that the current version of the Pandaboard uses the TI 4460, not the 4660 which was benchmarked. http://pandaboard.org/content/pandaboard-es http://pandaboard.org/content/pandaboard-es
- zokier 15y ago
  And the other Intel CPUs are from 2004(!) and 2006. I'm not really sure what they are attempting to show by using 8 year old CPU as a reference.
  - tomflack 15y ago
    It really seems like "what the author had laying around" stuff.
sciurus 15y ago
The ARM chip fares really poorly in the video encoding comparisons. Is this because of hardware differences, compiler differences, hand-written x86 assembly by the encoder programmers, or something else?
- willvarfar 15y ago
  Its likely an optimisation problem; whilst media playback codecs are often optimised for ARM, most video/audio capture on ARM devices is encoded by custom discrete hardware; the encoding of media on ARM using the CPU is likely not getting the same love as on x86.
- ZeroGravitas 15y ago
  Apart from the AVI to NTSC VCD (!?) conversion benchmark, which is probably down to missing optimizations, I thought it did as well as you'd expect it to, in line with the other computation heavy benchmarks. The surprise to me was how well it did in MP3 and Vorbis encoding, which makes me think there might be some DSP help in the TI board for that.
- DarkShikari 15y ago
  Most video encoders don't have NEON assembly code. If you're doing video encoding on any architecture, you need to use one that has SIMD for your architecture, or else it will be horribly slow. x264 is the only free software encoder I know that has NEON assembly code, though there might be others (certainly none in libavcodec).
willvarfar 15y ago
All this should be shown in ratio to cost or watts.
hackermom 15y ago
While I am not entirely surprised, this still makes me so happy to see, and makes me even more positive about a more efficient future of computing through the ARM core and its ISA. That Atom chip was even clocked 33% higher, and if my memory serves me right the Atom Diamondville also has a higher IPC than the current ARMv7.
- ajross 15y ago
  It's a little cooked. The OMAP4430 is a latest-and-greatest SoC design. The Atom N270 was released 4 years ago, for goodness sake. It's true that there's a hole in the Atom line right now -- Medfield would be the best comparison, and it's not in the market yet. Cedar Trail (also not quite released) is a higher power part than the N270, but should honestly wipe the floor with the OMAP. That's not to say that ARM hasn't come a long way over the past half decade. They clearly have, and are getting to the point where there almost at parity with Intel's SoC offerings. But this comparison isn't really fair.
  - hackermom 15y ago
    This isn't just about computational performance. It's just as much about power consumption. Diamondville sits at about 2.5 watts per core, while the A9 sits at under 300 mW per core, totalling to some orders of magnitude better performance per watt. Should we say that the comparison is unfair because of this as well? We could maintain that stance up until the point where we compare two CPUs with identical processing power and power consumption, but somehow that would defeat the purpose of comparing at all. And for the record, they could just as well have brought the Pineview and Cedar Trail cores into the picture, as fresh as the A9, which might've been more "fair", but very little still would've changed in computational performance. These tests are really about showing exactly how much you can get out of under a watt of power when opting out of x86.
    - ajross 15y ago
      Sure, there are apples/oranges problems all over the place in this comparison. But you completely missed my point. I'm saying that comparing TI's flagship SoC product with a 4-year old CPU that is three (soon to be four in a month or two) process nodes behind Intel's state of the art and claiming it is somehow representative of "ARM" vs. "Atom" is straight up crazy. How would you like it if Phoronix decided to show off a Medfield vs. ARM11, which are separated by roughtly the same amount of engineering time?
malkia 15y ago
And the point is? When was the last time you encoded video on mobile device, when you can off load the process to be done in some automatic batch on your PC, or online (there are at least 4 such services).
ChuckMcM 15y ago
It might have been more accurate to say, "Ubuntu onr ARM now identifiable as such in the rear view mirror of Intel." :-) There are a lot of valid comments here that these are ancient ATOM processors. But it is also valid to say that ARM SOCs have gotten to the point where they are encroaching on the space, and their makers (TI, BroadCom, Marvell, and others) are being forced by the demands of the SMARTPHONE wars to make them actually useful as general purpose platforms. As a systems guy I see the things that ARM is lacking, a decent IO bus equivalent to PCI, a memory channel architecture that allows for decent off chip memory performance with memory modules. Of course the 'market' for general purpose computers is much smaller than the market for computers as accessories (tablets, smartphones, laptops) so perhaps we'll hit a convergence point in the next couple of years.

45 points by tankenmate 15y ago

Interesting. I use an Atom-based netbook as my home machine and it always felt "fast enough" (up to the point it hits its disk, which is really slow). Now I want a new computer. BTW, the Atom N270 they are benchmarking was launched in 2008. They picked more or less the slowest Intel processor available. http://ark.intel.com/products/36331/Intel-Atom-Processor-N270-%28512K-Cache-1_60-GHz-533-MHz-FSB%29 http://ark.intel.com/products/36331/Intel-Atom-Processor-N27...

Symmetry 15y ago
Also, the N270 is two threads, instead of the 2 cores the author claims. I'd be really interested in seeing a better benchmark detailing what parts of which core are the fastest. My impression has always been that the A9 has really good execution resources compared to the Atom and can roast it in micro benchmarks, but that the better memory hierarchy of the Atom wins out in typical applications.
sciurus 15y ago
Agreed, it would have made more sense to test again the N455, which is common in netbooks shipping now, or its replacement the N2600. http://ark.intel.com/compare/36331,49491,58916 http://ark.intel.com/compare/36331,49491,58916
brudgers 15y ago
It also appears that the current version of the Pandaboard uses the TI 4460, not the 4660 which was benchmarked. http://pandaboard.org/content/pandaboard-es http://pandaboard.org/content/pandaboard-es
zokier 15y ago
And the other Intel CPUs are from 2004(!) and 2006. I'm not really sure what they are attempting to show by using 8 year old CPU as a reference.
- tomflack 15y ago
  It really seems like "what the author had laying around" stuff.

sciurus 15y ago

The ARM chip fares really poorly in the video encoding comparisons. Is this because of hardware differences, compiler differences, hand-written x86 assembly by the encoder programmers, or something else?

willvarfar 15y ago
Its likely an optimisation problem; whilst media playback codecs are often optimised for ARM, most video/audio capture on ARM devices is encoded by custom discrete hardware; the encoding of media on ARM using the CPU is likely not getting the same love as on x86.
ZeroGravitas 15y ago
Apart from the AVI to NTSC VCD (!?) conversion benchmark, which is probably down to missing optimizations, I thought it did as well as you'd expect it to, in line with the other computation heavy benchmarks. The surprise to me was how well it did in MP3 and Vorbis encoding, which makes me think there might be some DSP help in the TI board for that.
DarkShikari 15y ago
Most video encoders don't have NEON assembly code. If you're doing video encoding on any architecture, you need to use one that has SIMD for your architecture, or else it will be horribly slow. x264 is the only free software encoder I know that has NEON assembly code, though there might be others (certainly none in libavcodec).

willvarfar 15y ago

All this should be shown in ratio to cost or watts.

hackermom 15y ago

While I am not entirely surprised, this still makes me so happy to see, and makes me even more positive about a more efficient future of computing through the ARM core and its ISA. That Atom chip was even clocked 33% higher, and if my memory serves me right the Atom Diamondville also has a higher IPC than the current ARMv7.

ajross 15y ago
It's a little cooked. The OMAP4430 is a latest-and-greatest SoC design. The Atom N270 was released 4 years ago, for goodness sake. It's true that there's a hole in the Atom line right now -- Medfield would be the best comparison, and it's not in the market yet. Cedar Trail (also not quite released) is a higher power part than the N270, but should honestly wipe the floor with the OMAP. That's not to say that ARM hasn't come a long way over the past half decade. They clearly have, and are getting to the point where there almost at parity with Intel's SoC offerings. But this comparison isn't really fair.
- hackermom 15y ago
  This isn't just about computational performance. It's just as much about power consumption. Diamondville sits at about 2.5 watts per core, while the A9 sits at under 300 mW per core, totalling to some orders of magnitude better performance per watt. Should we say that the comparison is unfair because of this as well? We could maintain that stance up until the point where we compare two CPUs with identical processing power and power consumption, but somehow that would defeat the purpose of comparing at all. And for the record, they could just as well have brought the Pineview and Cedar Trail cores into the picture, as fresh as the A9, which might've been more "fair", but very little still would've changed in computational performance. These tests are really about showing exactly how much you can get out of under a watt of power when opting out of x86.
  - ajross 15y ago
    Sure, there are apples/oranges problems all over the place in this comparison. But you completely missed my point. I'm saying that comparing TI's flagship SoC product with a 4-year old CPU that is three (soon to be four in a month or two) process nodes behind Intel's state of the art and claiming it is somehow representative of "ARM" vs. "Atom" is straight up crazy. How would you like it if Phoronix decided to show off a Medfield vs. ARM11, which are separated by roughtly the same amount of engineering time?

malkia 15y ago

And the point is? When was the last time you encoded video on mobile device, when you can off load the process to be done in some automatic batch on your PC, or online (there are at least 4 such services).

ChuckMcM 15y ago

It might have been more accurate to say, "Ubuntu onr ARM now identifiable as such in the rear view mirror of Intel." :-) There are a lot of valid comments here that these are ancient ATOM processors. But it is also valid to say that ARM SOCs have gotten to the point where they are encroaching on the space, and their makers (TI, BroadCom, Marvell, and others) are being forced by the demands of the SMARTPHONE wars to make them actually useful as general purpose platforms. As a systems guy I see the things that ARM is lacking, a decent IO bus equivalent to PCI, a memory channel architecture that allows for decent off chip memory performance with memory modules. Of course the 'market' for general purpose computers is much smaller than the market for computers as accessories (tablets, smartphones, laptops) so perhaps we'll hit a convergence point in the next couple of years.