I use an Atom-based netbook as my home machine and it always felt "fast enough" (up to the point it hits its disk, which is really slow). Now I want a new computer.
BTW, the Atom N270 they are benchmarking was launched in 2008. They picked more or less the slowest Intel processor available.
Also, the N270 is two threads, instead of the 2 cores the author claims. I'd be really interested in seeing a better benchmark detailing what parts of which core are the fastest. My impression has always been that the A9 has really good execution resources compared to the Atom and can roast it in micro benchmarks, but that the better memory hierarchy of the Atom wins out in typical applications.
It might have been more accurate to say, "Ubuntu onr ARM now identifiable as such in the rear view mirror of Intel." :-)
There are a lot of valid comments here that these are ancient ATOM processors. But it is also valid to say that ARM SOCs have gotten to the point where they are encroaching on the space, and their makers (TI, BroadCom, Marvell, and others) are being forced by the demands of the SMARTPHONE wars to make them actually useful as general purpose platforms.
As a systems guy I see the things that ARM is lacking, a decent IO bus equivalent to PCI, a memory channel architecture that allows for decent off chip memory performance with memory modules.
Of course the 'market' for general purpose computers is much smaller than the market for computers as accessories (tablets, smartphones, laptops) so perhaps we'll hit a convergence point in the next couple of years.
And the point is? When was the last time you encoded video on mobile device, when you can off load the process to be done in some automatic batch on your PC, or online (there are at least 4 such services).
The ARM chip fares really poorly in the video encoding comparisons. Is this because of hardware differences, compiler differences, hand-written x86 assembly by the encoder programmers, or something else?
Its likely an optimisation problem; whilst media playback codecs are often optimised for ARM, most video/audio capture on ARM devices is encoded by custom discrete hardware; the encoding of media on ARM using the CPU is likely not getting the same love as on x86.
Apart from the AVI to NTSC VCD (!?) conversion benchmark, which is probably down to missing optimizations, I thought it did as well as you'd expect it to, in line with the other computation heavy benchmarks.
The surprise to me was how well it did in MP3 and Vorbis encoding, which makes me think there might be some DSP help in the TI board for that.
While I am not entirely surprised, this still makes me so happy to see, and makes me even more positive about a more efficient future of computing through the ARM core and its ISA. That Atom chip was even clocked 33% higher, and if my memory serves me right the Atom Diamondville also has a higher IPC than the current ARMv7.
Atom Diamondville also has a higher IPC than the current ARMv7
I'm not sure what you mean here. ARMv7 is an ISA, not an architecture, so different ARM cores that run ARMv7 code, everything from the A5 to the A15, will have radically different IPCs even though they can have the same set of instructions for a given program.
And you can't even really compare the IPC of processor architectures with different ISAs directly, its often easier to solve a problem in one ISA with less instructions than in a different ISA. RISC architectures often do less work per instruction than CISC architectures, but ARM has some features like instruction predication and argument shifting that mean that its individual instruction are often more powerful than, say, MIPS.
And it is actually fair to compare processor that have different clock rates, because often the architecture determines how fast a chip you can make. Itanium servers are only clocked at around half the speed of other architectures because the ISA is very complex and that's as fast as they can make them, and so comparing e.g. Power and Itanium processors of equal clock speed would be horribly unfair to the decisions that Power made that allow them to clock so high.
So to get a fair comparison you really want to just build the best processor of a given architecture you can on a given process, and let them fight it out like they do here. This can be pretty hard to do, since the performance of different company's processes on a given node can be rather different. I seem to recall that Intel could put maybe 20% more current through a N-gate on the 65nm node than their competitors, for instance, but using the same process would be the ideal.
How can you produce such a wall of text over a little misnomer? You obviously understood that I am referring to the current incarnation of the ARMv7 ISA, a.k.a the Cortex family.
Mostly I put up a wall of text because I think the subject is interesting and I wanted to talk about it, but really there is no one IPC for the Cortex Family. An A5 will tend to have an IPC that is much lower than an Atom. An A15 will tend to have an IPC that is much higher than an Atom.
And for the cores being compared here, on tight microbenchmarks the superior execution resources[1] and OoO execution of an A9 will put it ahead of an Atom, but on pointer chasing code the superior branch predictor of the Atom will probably give it a higher IPC.
EDIT: [1] Well, really the 16 vs 8 registers, 3 operand instructions, and free barrel shift in each instruction. I think they have the same number of ALUs and AGUs.
It's a little cooked. The OMAP4430 is a latest-and-greatest SoC design. The Atom N270 was released 4 years ago, for goodness sake.
It's true that there's a hole in the Atom line right now -- Medfield would be the best comparison, and it's not in the market yet. Cedar Trail (also not quite released) is a higher power part than the N270, but should honestly wipe the floor with the OMAP.
That's not to say that ARM hasn't come a long way over the past half decade. They clearly have, and are getting to the point where there almost at parity with Intel's SoC offerings. But this comparison isn't really fair.
This isn't just about computational performance. It's just as much about power consumption. Diamondville sits at about 2.5 watts per core, while the A9 sits at under 300 mW per core, totalling to some orders of magnitude better performance per watt. Should we say that the comparison is unfair because of this as well? We could maintain that stance up until the point where we compare two CPUs with identical processing power and power consumption, but somehow that would defeat the purpose of comparing at all. And for the record, they could just as well have brought the Pineview and Cedar Trail cores into the picture, as fresh as the A9, which might've been more "fair", but very little still would've changed in computational performance.
These tests are really about showing exactly how much you can get out of under a watt of power when opting out of x86.
Sure, there are apples/oranges problems all over the place in this comparison. But you completely missed my point.
I'm saying that comparing TI's flagship SoC product with a 4-year old CPU that is three (soon to be four in a month or two) process nodes behind Intel's state of the art and claiming it is somehow representative of "ARM" vs. "Atom" is straight up crazy.
How would you like it if Phoronix decided to show off a Medfield vs. ARM11, which are separated by roughtly the same amount of engineering time?
Intel hasn't improved performance of Atom all that much in the past 4 years. They've been mostly working on lowering TDP, while in the same time ARM tried to maintain their very low TDP, while increasing performance.
Either way, these are still underclocked Cortex A9 CPU's. By the time Intel Atom hits the market in a phone or tablet, it will compete with same clock dual core or quad core Cortex A9, dual core Krait chips, and possibly even dual core Cortex A15 chips by summer.
There's no way Intel will remain competitive - not even in performance, let alone power consumption and price.
I'm with you up until the last sentence, where you veer off into fantasy land. When will the ARM competitor to a 4-core 3.7GHz Sandy Bridge arrive? :)
[edit, rather than needlessly extend a fanboi thread: the comparison with SB certainly is relevant to your statement "There's no way Intel will remain competitive - not even in performance", which was laughably wrong. Intel won't be losing the lead in performance any time this decade, I assure you.]
Look, this is all just fine. ARM has made some amazing progress in the last five years, and they are to be commended. But the cheerleading has gotten out of hand. Intel's death has been predicted so many times over the years that it's become a running gag in the industry. ARM Ltd. is just the latest competitor to show some spunk. Will they succeed where Motorola, MIPS, DEC, and AMD failed? ... Maybe! But I'm not putting a lot of money on it. And I'm certainly not changing my opinion based on a comparison between a brand new Pandaboard/GNexus and a so-old-it-smells-bad netbook.
[1] 68000, then R2000, then Alpha, then the K6/Athlon/Athlon64 -- every one of those designs was going to "kill Intel" according to "serious people in the Industry" -- check the Google groups archives for all the fun flame wars.
The comparison with Intel's highest performance chip is irrelevant. Yes, Intel will always maintain a lead in raw performance. But the point is as ARM chip increase in performance to become good enough for laptops, they will still be cheaper and more efficient than Intel chips at that same level - so it makes buying ARM almost a nobrainer. ARM will keep pushing Intel up-market and away from lower-end devices, until there's little market share left in the mobile/laptop market for Intel.
Intel won't die. These things take many years or even decades. You could argue that the PC didn't "kill" the mainframe for 30 years since the PC first appeared, but what happened is that mainframes became increasingly less relevant, and PC architectures increasingly more relevant and popular in more than one market.
No I got your point exactly. But Diamondville, Pineview et al. represents the current available state of the art in mobile x86 cores from Intel. Medfield isn't released yet, but when it shows up I would be pleased seeing it pitted against the state of the art ARM cores.
I think the comparison would be better if made with currently available similar devices. There are Atom processors with comparable power consumption and, I assume, better performance than the N270.
And then there is the OMAP 5 family, which looks very promising. And the 4470 is a more current representative of the OMAP 4 family. The 4430 they benchmarked is the low-end guy.
I think it's safe to assume someone is building OMAP 4470 or OMAP 5 devices that could be benchmarked against the current crop of netbooks and low power x86 notebooks.
That would be Pineview and Cedar Trail. I am not sure if the CPU portion of these cores have the same power consumption as the N270; their TDP includes the consumption of the on-die GPU as well. As far as computational power goes, they are just marginally better performers than the Diamondville core.
Not only it has two cores instead of one, it has 64-bit instructions (and twice as many registers), an L2 cache twice as large and 4 times the memory bandwidth (if I read the specs correctly). The TDP is much larger, but that only means it has an integrated number cruncher that can, conceivably, do some numeric heavy-lifting.
I use an Atom-based netbook as my home machine and it always felt "fast enough" (up to the point it hits its disk, which is really slow). Now I want a new computer.
BTW, the Atom N270 they are benchmarking was launched in 2008. They picked more or less the slowest Intel processor available.
http://ark.intel.com/products/36331/Intel-Atom-Processor-N27...