Creator CI20 - Debian 8 beta image

I purchased the original MIPS Creator CI20 and the Raspberry Pi 2 on their release. The CI20, manufactured by Imagination Technologies, had many attractive selling points, not least its built-in connectivity (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), its good hardware specifications with 1GB DDR3 SDRAM, 8 GB flash memory, and a PowerVR SGX540 GPU. However, the CI20 has not been, to date, a commercial success like the Pi 2. With so many units sold, the Pi 2 has built a huge community base, driven by some excellent distributions with successive updates. A revised Creator CI20 was released in May, and has an improved layout, but its enhancements were still overshadowed by the slow pace of software development.

Last week Imagination Technologies announced that the CI20 microcomputer is getting an update to Debian 8, with a modern Linux kernel 3.18, and major driver updates to the PowerVR graphics and Wi-Fi firmware, along with changes to the NAND memory driver. The announcement piqued my interest in the CI20 again.

The Debian 8 distribution is currently in beta, and has some issues including the lack of video hardware acceleration support for video players and audio recording. The beta is available on elinux’s website. To overwrite the onboard NAND memory, first write the beta image to a 32GB SD card. You need to change the boot_sl switch on the board to cover Pins 2 and 3, and then insert the SD card in the CI20. The board’s LED momentarily flashes red, then goes off a second, and then turns blue. This indicates that the image is being written to the NAND memory. After about 11 minutes, the LED turns back to red. This indicates the writing process has been completed. All very straightforward.

The first impressions are that the CI20 still feels significantly slower than the Pi 2, particularly using X Windows, but quicker than running Debian 7. How did start up times fare?

As you can see from the chart above, the boot up times of the CI20 are significantly improved under Debian 8, particularly powering on to the console, and launching LibreOffice Impress. But still the CI20 takes an age to get to the desktop compared with a Raspberry Pi 2. The start up time of popular applications such as LibreOffice Impress, GIMP, Shutter, and Filezilla and Terminal all see noticeable improvements with the beta Debian 8 operating system.

NBench

NBench is a single core synthetic computing benchmark which tests both integer performance and floating point performance.

The Raspberry Pi 2 scores 20.141 in the integer index, and 8.630 in the floating-point index. This is with a Linux 3.18.8-v7+ kernel. The MIPS CI20 (under Debian 7) scores an integer index of 18.032 and a floating-point index of 3.881. Using the updated Debian 8 beta, the CI20’s scores were almost identical. Full results are available in the screenshots below.

HardInfo

HardInfo acts both as a system profiler and benchmark. Here are the results of HardInfo’s benchmarks.

MIPS Creator CI20

Debian 8 MIPS Creator CI20

Debian 7 Raspberry PI 2

CPU Blowfish 66.03 65.75 61.79 CPU Cryptohash 13.96 14.03 15.48 CPU Fibonacci 23.20 23.10 16.10 CPU N-Queens 50.03 50.23 51.81 FPU FFT 91.69 83.27 79.81 FPU Raytracing 112.05 95.70 74.84

For all of the tests above with the exception of CPU Cryptohash, lower figures are better. Bear in mind that these tests only use a single core. Here, the CI20’s results were not that unfavourable, being comparable for the Blowfish, N-Queens, and FPU FFT tests.

GtkPerf





MIPS Creator CI20

Debian 8 MIPS Creator CI 20

Debian 7 Raspberry PI 2

GtkEntry 0.66 0.46 0.15 GtkComboBox 10.19 7.06 3.50 GtkComboBoxEntry 6.82 5.64 2.36 GtkSpinButton 1.94 3.31 0.53 GtkProgressBar 1.62 2.28 0.43 GtkToggleButton 1.91 2.39 0.55 GtkCheckButton 0.83 1.53 1.63 GtkRadioButton 1.22 2.02 0.62 GtkTextView - Add text 2.40 4.70 1.63 GtkView - Scroll 1.67 2.26 0.62 GtkDrawingArea - Lines 5.06 8.92 1.72 GtkDrawingArea - Circles 8.11 243.77 3.29 GtkDrawingArea - Text 8.38 7.01 2.90 GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs 1.24 2.54 0.63 Total time 52.09 293.92 19.34

It’s a fact that the CI20’s results with Debian 8 are a far cry from the Raspberry Pi 2, but they still represent a massive improvement on the original software release.

SysBench

SysBench is an open source multi-threaded benchmark tool for testing CPU performance, memory allocation, file I/O performance and more.

With the Raspberry Pi 2, the CPU test with only a single core and all four cores executes in 298 and 74.5 seconds respectively. With the MIPS Creator CI 20 running Debian 7, the score with a single core is 138.7, with both cores the execution time is 69.2. With the MIPS running Debian 8, the scores are 139.0 and 69.4, so very little difference between the two.