LuaJIT SciMark Intel/ARM comparison

From: Mike Pall <mike-1208@xxxxxxxxxx>

To: luajit@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2012 21:52:45 +0200

Thanks to everyone for their data points! This allows an interesting cross-architectural comparison ... Sure, SciMark is floating-point heavy (as the name implies), but it still has a significant integer component, due to all of the array indexing and traversals. Of course, you'll have to decide whether this is a typical work load for your application and whether this benchmark is relevant for you at all. Absolute LuaJIT SciMark scores (higher is better): 785.4 Intel Core 2 E8400, 3.0 GHz 124.7 Intel Atom N270, 1.6 GHz 118.4 Asus Transformer Prime, Nvidia Tegra 3, ARM Cortex-A9, 1.3 GHz 76.7 HTC EVO 3D, Qualcomm Snapdragon S3, ARM Cortex-A8+, 1.2 GHz 32.4 Beagleboard xM, TI DM3730, ARM Cortex-A8, 1.0 GHz 27.5 Raspberry Pi, Broadcom BCM2835, ARM 1176JZF-S, 0.7 GHz LuaJIT SciMark scores weighted by GHz: 261.8 Intel Core 2 E8400 91.1 ARM Cortex-A9 77.9 Intel Atom N270 63.9 ARM Cortex-A8+ 39.3 ARM 1176JZF-S 32.4 ARM Cortex-A8 A couple observations: * A slightly older Intel Atom loses on a floating-point intensive benchmark against a recent ARM core. * The hearsay that a (plain) ARM Cortex-A8 has rather unimpressive VFP performance is apparently true -- it's beaten by a much older ARM 1176JZF-S design when scaled by GHz. [Ok, so the the simpler design probably wouldn't scale without extensive modifications to the pipelines. But the original Cortex-A8 design with VFP on handbrakes _does_ show.] * The other hearsay that Qualcomm has taken the original Cortex-A8 design, but tuned it heavily for their Snapdragon line seems to be true. The S3 nearly doubles the FP performance over a plain A8. A comparison with the Snapdragon S4 or the Exynos line would be really interesting. Even more interesting would be to show the SciMark scores weighted by power consumption (one core under full load). Alas, that data is not readily available, so I'll leave the speculation to others (but I think it would be off-topic for this list). --Mike

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