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PandaBoard ES Benchmarked

Posted by Unknown on 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."

9 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. What about power and cost? by GreatBunzinni · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    --
    Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
    1. Re:What about power and cost? by tsahil · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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...

    2. Re:What about power and cost? by Desler · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:What about power and cost? by hattig · · Score: 2

      The TI OMAP 4460 actually does use a full programmable DSP, and can decode and encode 1080p30 apparently.
      http://www.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12843&contentId=53243

      The 1.8GHz OMAP 4470 should be out soon as well - that will surely perform even more comparably to the Intel Medfield offering coming in the same timeframe.
      http://www.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12869&contentId=123362

  2. TI by Kagetsuki · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:These tests are irrelevant at best by Desler · · Score: 2

    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.

    It gets you doing multiple 720p streams at once. 720@30p is child's play.

  4. Era of absurdly overpriced ARM boards is ending by Roman+Mamedov · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Era of absurdly overpriced ARM boards is ending by Roman+Mamedov · · Score: 2

      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)

      So, $130 for a bare board with CPU and RAM?
      Yeah that would sound great, except when anyone can build a whole PC for $191, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2392163,00.asp
      With 2x the RAM and a CPU that rips the ARM on PandaBoard into a thousand of tiny teddy bears in terms of performance.
      And a frigging 500 GB HDD (ok, pre-HDD-crisis).

      You could say, "yeah but it's not ARM and low-power etc". Okay. There are now Chinese tablets with comparable specs, http://www.aliexpress.com/product-gs/509457480-CPAM-Free-shipping-10-1-superpad-3-android-2-3-tablet-pc-flytouch-3-GPS-512MB-wholesalers.html
      that cost $125 shipped. Including stuff like 10" touch screen, camera, internal flash, battery, casing, etc, etc. There's no way a bare board should cost $130. It's just vendors up until now felt just fine with hiking up the price as much as they desire, because those who need it (for development etc) would buy it anyway, or even buy on their company's funds. But hopefully the Raspberry Pi will beat some sense into competitors in this area, and this will move an ARM PC from the ranks of a too-expensive-to-be-practical dream, to reality.

  5. Re:ARM is coming along BADLY! by White+Flame · · Score: 2

    You do know that all 3 current gen game consoles are driven by PPC CPUs, right?