PandaBoard ES Benchmarked

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has benchmarked the Texas Instruments PandaBoard ES and compared its performance against Intel Atom N270, Atom Z530, Pentium M, and Core Duo T2400 processors. The OMAP4660 dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 development board generally loses out to Intel's older competition, but does manage to win in ray-tracing and other tests, and is advantageous on a per-Watt basis."

What about power and cost?

[GreatBunzinni]

The benchmarks provided by Phoronix focus on computational power, which is a relevant criteria. Yet, ARM-based systems aren't targeted at the high performance computing field. In their domain of application, criteria such as power usage and price tends to be much more relevant than how fast it compresses files, encodes MP3s or runs synthetic benchmarks. In fact, if it is fast enough to play media then it's fast enough to do anything at all.

So, how about comparing them where they need to be compared: power output and price?

Re:What about power and cost?

[tsahil]

There's even more to it... In these benchmarks the accelerators of the OMAP4 were totally ignored. These would have improved things like x264 encoding to being a lot faster even than a Core i7 chip. The OMAP4 as do other ARM Cortex A9 chipsets, have a lot of accelerators to deal specifically with highly computational tasks - and when you develop you actually use them...

Re:What about power and cost?

[Desler]

These would have improved things like x264 encoding to being a lot faster even than a Core i7 chip.

And yet you provide no actual evidence of this beyond an assertion. Please show your x.264 settings, which corei7 you used (there is more than one model), link to your source material, etc. so that you're results can be duplicated and verified.