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."

These tests are irrelevant at best

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of the tests are irrelevant when done between Atom and OMAP4.
The OMAP4 has internal accelerators for voice and video coding - stuff like VP8 and x264 can be done a lot faster on the OMAP4 if you ditch the software itself and use the OMAP4's accelerators instead.
We've been able to use OMAP4660 for encoding 720p at 30fps into H.264 while using only ~20% of the CPU. Try doing that in software on a Core i7 and see where it gets you.

When doing benchmarking on ARM Cortex chipsets, there needs to be more care taken in how you treat the accelerators of the SoC in question and if you use them at all. By the results of these benchmarking trial it seems that the accelerators were ignored altogether - not something I'd do if I were to actually use the OMAP4 for any real development.

TI

[Kagetsuki]

As someone with experience doing embedded development on ARM I can tell you I found the OMAP architecture to be awful. I'll admit the only time I ever used it was on a demo board (the Beagle) vs a board with essentially identical specs from FreeScale, Renesas and a few others. TI was awful with support, their documents were awful, the hardware was flaky (overheating!?) and the sample sources and module sources they provided were absolute crap. On top of that when we did get the boards running and started comparing them the OMAP board was slow as tar on anything that involved a lot of memory operations in a small timeframe. Apparently the GLES subsystem was fantastic or something but after a few attempts we couldn't get the modules built correctly against the kernel we were using and just gave up. In the end we went with the FreeScale (not my choice) which was easily superior to the TI OMAP garbage.

Sorry TI, I'm not even touching this one.

Era of absurdly overpriced ARM boards is ending

[Roman Mamedov]

I will ENJOY seeing this absolutely DESTROYED, BEAT INTO THE ASPHALT in terms of price to performance by the Raspberry Pi very soon. Days of $100-200 ARM boards are coming to an end, now dear Pandawhatever please set the sane price of $50 for your board, or die out of existence.