Slashdot Mirror
NVIDIA Tegra X1 Performance Exceeds Intel Bay Trail SoCs, AMD AM1 APUs
An anonymous reader writes: A NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV modified to run Ubuntu Linux is providing interesting data on how NVIDIA's latest "Tegra X1" 64-bit ARM big.LITTLE SoC compares to various Intel/AMD/MIPS systems of varying form factors. Tegra X1 benchmarks on Ubuntu show strong performance with the X1 SoC in this $200 Android TV device, beating out low-power Intel Atom/Celeron Bay Trail SoCs, AMD AM1 APUs, and in some workloads is even getting close to an Intel Core i3 "Broadwell" NUC. The Tegra X1 features Maxwell "GM20B" graphics and the total power consumption is less than 10 Watts.
The X1 uses a standard ARM Cortex A57 (specifically it's an A57/A53 big.LITTLE 4+4 config), so this says more about ARM's chip than anything nVidia did...
Now if you compared nVidia's Denver CPU, their in-house processor... The Denver is nearly twice as fast as the A57, but only comes in a dual-core config, so it's probably drawing a good deal more power. When you compare a quad-core A57 to a dual-core Denver, the A57 comes out slightly ahead in multicore benchmarks. Of course, single core performance is important too, so I'd be tempted to take a dual-core part over a quad-core if the dual-core had twice the performance per-core...
Why the X1 didn't use a variant of Denver isn't something that nVidia has said, but the assumption most make is that it wasn't ready for the die shrink to 20nm that the X1 entailed.
Look here at the compiler settings. The x86 processors are somewhat hampered by non-optimal settings. For example the i3 5010U is set to -mtune=generic. In my experience, that's basically going to default to AMD K8 optimization with no AVX/AVX2 support. The better option would be using -mtune=native or better yet -march=native, which would detect the CPU and produce a more optimized binary.