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Intel Ubuntu Linux

PandaBoard ES Benchmarked 77

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the entering-calendar-entries-was-never-so-fast dept.
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."
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PandaBoard ES Benchmarked More

PandaBoard ES Benchmarked

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  • ARM is coming along (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28, 2011 @10:52AM (#38514734)

    Still not as fast as it's power hogging competition, but pretty decent.

    I do a lot of work with Gumstix Overo's, and at home on the original Pandaboard. I am constantly amazed at how powerful those little systems are.

    To be sure my Quad Core Xeon that I cross compile on will eat them for lunch... but at 5x the cost and 50x the power consumption.

  • What about power and cost? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GreatBunzinni ( 642500 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2011 @10:55AM (#38514766)

    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?

  • These tests are irrelevant at best (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28, 2011 @10:56AM (#38514772)

    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.

  • Phoronix (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28, 2011 @10:57AM (#38514794)

    after so many years, the constant Phoronix crap on the front page is like parody

  • TI (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kagetsuki ( 1620613 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2011 @11:04AM (#38514870)

    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.

    • Re:TI (Score:2)

      by gatkinso ( 15975 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2011 @12:02PM (#38515596)

      I am doing a lot of development on Gumstix Overos and am finding that platform to be pretty sweet. I think many of the problems you are encountering might be an artifact of the Beagle (who incidentally flat out state not to base an actual product on their hardware).

    • Re:TI (Score:0)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28, 2011 @02:32PM (#38517470)

      We are using some TI chips in our company, and i found OMAP architecture to be awful :
      - the hardware is very complex (they include stuff for compatibility with previous version, ...)
      - the kernel driver are developed for demo board (with hard-coded stuff).
      - the software is very complex (count the line of code in the linux kernel for Omap and freescale) and buggy.
      - the support is really bad : lot's of time we spend so much time to explain what's the problem, how to reproduce it, that we ended in solving it ourself...

      PS : I seems that TI out-source some of their software to India and Bulgaria

    • Re:TI (Score:0)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28, 2011 @10:34PM (#38522252)

      Complete opposite of my experience with TI and Freescale.

      When we need to support Freescale parts, we take our estimate, and triple it.

    • Could you give me some advice on building a standalone mixing pult/equalizer? I was considering a cheap dev board with plenty o' DSP and linux, but I don't know how to pick it up from there. I'm kinda on a shoestring budget (<$800).

      • Re:TI (Score:2)

        by Kagetsuki ( 1620613 ) on Friday December 30, 2011 @06:06AM (#38536724)

        Well even on the project where the OMAP was evaluated I wasn't the one making the final decisions and I haven't been doing much device development lately either, so at the moment I don't think I could give you much good advice. You're lucky looking for something like that now though, because with all the tablets and smart phones out now everyone seems to be offering really complete and capable ARM dev boards with well done reference designs. You may also want to check out the communities around those manufacturers. Also, just some personal advice but if you are doing a non-commercial project I'd recommend putting together some design documents and promise to release open source/open hardware - companies like Atmel and Renesas love that kind of stuff and may give you free samples/dev hardware/other goodies.

  • How about OpenCL for POWERVR?? (Score:2)

    by gatkinso ( 15975 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2011 @11:06AM (#38514896)

    Where are the drivers and SDK for this?

  • MIPS/FLOPS per $... (Score:2)

    by lobiusmoop ( 305328 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2011 @11:23AM (#38515094) Homepage

    A more interesting benchmark for me at the moment is performance per $, which is where Raspberry Pi is going to have a big impact soon I think.

  • Benchmark seems to be missing lots (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28, 2011 @11:44AM (#38515374)

    Reading the article I'm left with a number of what I feel are important questions.

    Firstly, which distro was this run on? I don't believe the 11.12 linaro release was (www.linaro.org) used which would be the most optimized for arm choice that currently exists. I looked at the phoronix source code and it seems to have no concept of linaro at all tho it does know ubuntu and debian of which linaro is a varient.

    GFX Hardware acceleration for the Pandaboard ES is a bit of a work in progress, it's hard to know if the lastest work was included.

    The article does not state which version of the compilers is in use. gcc 4.4 ? 4.6? flags? It can make a bit of a difference.

    There is no statement if the intel comparisons are running the same level of software or not? This is another important data point.

    Others have mentioned but I will too, it does appear that software decode/encoders were uses instead of the hardware versions. This would substantially change the numbers.

    All that said, for someone obtaining a board, pulling software from anywhere without direction as to how to get the best performing code for arm, this would seem to be a good sample. If the goal of the article was to see the Pandaboard ES running with the best performance as compared to intel atom running at it's best, this article misses the mark completely.

  • Era of absurdly overpriced ARM boards is ending (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Roman Mamedov ( 793802 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2011 @12:12PM (#38515714) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Era of absurdly overpriced ARM boards is ending (Score:0)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28, 2011 @12:27PM (#38515942)

      While the PI board looks nice, you are comparing apples to oranges. There is a lot more on that Panda board. The PI board is ancient ARM11..... That and at this point it is Vapor ware until they are actually selling product.

      • The PI board is ancient ARM11...

        Oh, that's right. Hasn't Broadcom licensed any of the Cortex cores yet? No wonder they're able to make them so cheap; they're several generations behind and ARM Holdings mustn't be charging much in royalties.

        How far behind? Well each of the Cortex-A9 cores in this OMAP 4-based SoC perform about 2.5 times better than ARM11 at the same clock speed. So each one could get about the same amount of work done as the 700 MHz ARM11 while puttering along at only 280 MHz. The dual-core OMAP 4460 running at 1.2 GHz has about 1200 * 2 * 2.5 / 700 = 8.57 times the processing power of the Raspberry Pi. Hmm... $25 * 8.57 = $214.29. So the $187 price of the PandaBoard ES (subsidised by TI) may be worth it!

        • Re:Era of absurdly overpriced ARM boards is ending (Score:0)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28, 2011 @02:24PM (#38517372)

          As the Nokia N8 has shown (It uses a SOC that is slower than the one used by RaspberryPI), there's more to a SOC than just a fast CPU. Sure an A9 is faster (broadcom does offer a chip similar to the one used in PI where the ARM11 is replaced by an A9), but is it that much more important for most low-end needs?

          RaspberryPI has three basic interest groups. The first is education; CPU power isn't critical here, but cost is. The second is HTPC; CPU power isn't critical here, but GPU power and cost are (note: Roku 2 uses the same SOC). The third is hobbyists; this group would often be content with a 20 year old pocket-calculator or some old, hackable piece of tech, an ARM11 is definitely okay as long as it's cheap and hackable.

          As far as power per dollar, things change when you account for the dual-videocore IV GPU. According to the official RaspberryPI wiki page, the GPU offers 24GFLOPS of compute power. The SGX543MP2 in the ipad only offers 12.8GFLOPS of power. With the pandaboard SGX540 (3.2GFLOPS according to anandtech) being 1/7 the power of the Broadcom GPU, suddenly things look different. RaspberryPI offers the best GPUs available with one of the worst CPUs available (resulting in what is technically the most powerful silicon around) while still undercutting boards like Panda or Beagle by 2.5 - 5.5x in pricing.

          For people wanting more CPU power, I think that modding and using several RaspberryPI,s in a small cluster could be an entertaining project.

    • Why the hate? This has 4 times the memory, twice the clock speed and twice the cores of the Pi, of course it isn't going to be less then twice the price.
      Everything else being equal you might expect nearly 4 times the price (i.e. ~$130) but not only is this already actually available (and we don't know what it will cost once we can actually buy a Pi), but the Raspberry Pi is hoping to operate without profit and to short-cut the economies of scale with large government orders for education. If they achieve that, and it is a big if, then they may well out compete Panda et al. but even then I will be very grateful the higher-end boards are still available.

    • Re:Era of absurdly overpriced ARM boards is ending (Score:0)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28, 2011 @01:46PM (#38516912)

      100-200$ for a decent ARM EVM is a good price. I recall buying quite a few for 1.5-2k about 2 years ago. That was absurdly overpriced, wasn't it ?

  • Panaboard - Tests not done with Hard Float (Score:1)

    by thatkid_2002 ( 1529917 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2011 @09:20PM (#38521718)

    A lot of the tests that were done would have benefited from having Hard Float. Ubuntu ARM port does not have Hard Float. They should have used the Debian HardFloat port to get more accurate performance metrics of what the hardware can do.

    I'm not arguing over semantics or fractions of percentages - Hard Float would have given an easy 20% increase in performance for some tests! For example here's an engineer from Genesi showing off the Debain Hard-Float work a few months back... 300% increase in some places? [armdevices.net]

    Would you benchmark cars giving all the others high-octane fuel except one?

    Please let it Soft-float fucking die already. It's horrible.

  • By weight or volume (Score:1)

    by niftymitch ( 1625721 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2011 @10:28PM (#38522180)

    I would like to see a 12 hour benchmark that reported normalized results
    in terms of Kg of battery. All these processors are in the ball park for
    operations per second but many can NOT do it all day long.

    Twelve and 24 hour results are needed to be sure. But a smart phone with a three hour
    battery life is not a smart design. Simply from the safety point of view this is important.

    • Re:By weight or volume (Score:1)

      by qualityassurancedept ( 2469696 ) on Thursday December 29, 2011 @12:17AM (#38522790) Journal
      Yes, but then the issue is that the device is only for people who need more than three hours at full operating capacity without access to any kind of powersource... and in reality that is not necessarily very many people... especially if you consider that a $100 device can compete with a $600 iPad for most people's needs. My laptop only gets about 4 hours on battery with dimmed screen and wifi and blue tooth off and I have never really found that to be a major limitation of its portability or usefulness.

      • Re:By weight or volume (Score:1)

        by niftymitch ( 1625721 ) on Thursday December 29, 2011 @09:32PM (#38534206)

        Yes, but then the issue is that the device is only for people who need more than three hours at full operating capacity without access to any kind of powersource... and in reality that is not necessarily very many people... especially if you consider that a $100 device can compete with a $600 iPad for most people's needs. My laptop only gets about 4 hours on battery with dimmed screen and wifi and blue tooth off and I have never really found that to be a major limitation of its portability or usefulness.

        BUT a phone is a critical safety device. Dialing 911 or 999 for emergency services
        when stuck in a snow drift or calling to tell your safe and sound kids to stay put after a tornado has
        passed ... but wait the kids phone battery is exhausted because they were playing
        Angry Birds now you do not know....

        • Re:By weight or volume (Score:1)

          by qualityassurancedept ( 2469696 ) on Friday December 30, 2011 @07:22AM (#38536956) Journal
          In that case, I don't think it really makes sense to let children play Angry Birds on battery with your critical safety device. The problem seems to be that people expect a critical safety device to be useful as a toy, phone, computer, car battery and who knows what else.... which is of course rather a lot to ask from a retail device that you are literally risking your life on hoping it functions correctly in critical situations.

          • Re:By weight or volume (Score:1)

            by niftymitch ( 1625721 ) on Sunday January 01, 2012 @03:03AM (#38554548)

            In that case, I don't think it really makes sense to let children play Angry Birds on battery with your critical safety device. The problem seems to be that people expect a critical safety device to be useful as a toy, phone, computer, car battery and who knows what else.... which is of course rather a lot to ask from a retail device that you are literally risking your life on hoping it functions correctly in critical situations.

            I am with you -- yet the parents that give their kids "smart" phones are not thinking
            about a quake or a regional power outage. My guess is they are thinking -- is
            my kid home yet, has he stopped at his GF house to neck blow smoke.

            It starts with the very young kids, too young to exercise personal restraint
            especially where Angry Birds is considered safe and blowing smoke and having
            sex at age 11 is not.

  • Yank my tool chain. (Score:1)

    by niftymitch ( 1625721 ) on Thursday December 29, 2011 @06:46PM (#38532340)

    The compilers, libs and more for x86 and friends
    are so much more mature this is hardly a fair game.
    The best high school players paired against the
    winner of the superbowl....

    And it is not just the processor the comparison
    seemed to depend a lot on graphics drivers that are
    just now using graphics hardware.

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