Freescale's i.MX6 SoC Smacks The Old Intel Atom Z530

[liam]

+1 to that. It's not like an A9@1 GHz is latest ARM can compete with.
And yes, Baytrail will kick the crap out of an A15 but you have to remember that current Baytrail chips are in a totally different power envelope. If you want to go on that path a 17W ULV Haswell CPU can probably wipe the floor with a Baytrail but again, it's also the power usage.
And while obvious I still think the article shows how far ARM has come. You have to remember that once upon a time ARM was making 200 MHz chips that could barely power a smartphone.

I'm not certain that baytrail would beat an a15(post rev 1 at least). Aiui the a57 is very similar to the a15 save for the width.
Also the cyclone cores of apple look to be close to the efficiency of haswell (check out anandtech). Since the cyclones are a slightly hobbled a57 I'd expect those to perform even better.

[Fresh_meat]

The a7 are brand new designs (unless you mean these aren't cortex series). Actually the a7 should be a perfect router chip as long as you don't need to perform anything too complicated.

My bad, seems I mixed things a bit here. It was the allwinner A10 who inclued a Cortex A8 which was the first Cortex to implement ARMv7 instruction set.

Thanks for pointing that, the cubie board 3 looks to me way better now

[Imroy]

The i.MX6 quad soc looks very interesting regaring his computing power, but the problem, as often with the current avaliable, unexpensive and easy to find arm systems, is the lack of proper gigabyte network. The i.MX6 containt a dual gigabyte ethernet circuit, but it seems to be internaly bridged on the USB 2.0 controler, wich result at a top transfere rate of 480MBis (actually it seems more like 470MBis), and maybe it is even less if the the dual port are used together (I never see any benchs about it).

Not entirely correct. The i.MX6 has a single GigE interface. It's not through USB, but there is some internal bus limitation limiting it to somewhere around 480Mb/s. Which is why the Utilite adds a second GigE interface using the PCIe interface.

One of the avaliable options for and ARM system with gigabyte ethernet (without relying on an external USB 3 to ethernet converter), is the cubieboard 3, wich come with a nice "open" box able to hold a 2.5" form factor HDD (so up to 2GB actually), sadly, the soc is an allwiner A20 and so that's basically two oldish A7 cores, so it's probably not the best choice for implementing a FSMO replacement cluster using Samba 4 for your small business

The Cortex-A7 is actually quite new, newer than the Cortex-A9 and A15. It's just targeted at the low-end. So the pipeline is short and only "mostly" dual-issue. But its FPU implements VFPv4-d16 and NEON, so it performs fairly well at floating-point tasks. And it's feature-compatible with the Cortex-A15 so that it can be paired with that core in a big.LITTLE setup. That means it also has LPAE (large physical address extension) and virtualisation support. It's actually a half-decent little core.

Maybe AMD will do with ARM what Intel is doing with its Itanium : sharing parts of the design between the Itaniums and Xeons, so, even if it's two different architectures, there will be able to produce them on the same socket, sharing some parts like caches, chipsets, ... It seems AMD's CPU chip since Bulldozer are very neat and flexible (why not swap the x86 processing modules by ARM ones and reprogram the ?code accordingly ? supposing it is that simple ...) That would be great to have better ARM processor in high volume on standard motherboards

That would indeed be great. Most ARM SoC's so far have been made for the mobile market and have pretty limited I/O e.g just a few USB hosts. Imagine having a 64-bit ARM chip with external DDR3 RAM and a bunch of PCIe lanes to a south-bridge chip, which would provide multiple SATA ports and all the other integrated goodness.

[curaga]

The i.MX6 has a single GigE interface. It's not through USB, but there is some internal bus limitation limiting it to somewhere around 480Mb/s.

What a strange coincidence, my dear watson. How many buses do you know that cap at that amount?

[libv]

One of the avaliable options for and ARM system with gigabyte ethernet (without relying on an external USB 3 to ethernet converter), is the cubieboard 3, wich come with a nice "open" box able to hold a 2.5" form factor HDD (so up to 2GB actually), sadly, the soc is an allwiner A20 and so that's basically two oldish A7 cores, so it's probably not the best choice for implementing a FSMO replacement cluster using Samba 4 for your small business

A7 old?

A7 is much younger than A8 and A9. It's just the absolute-power optimized version of the A15, and is usually found in big.little configurations next to. It's not old at all, it only started shipping a year or so ago. It isn't fast, but it's not too bad in a dual-core combination.

[Imroy]

What a strange coincidence, my dear watson. How many buses do you know that cap at that amount?

None of the docs or diagrams I can find (like this one) indicate that the Ethernet is connected over USB. Maybe it's just that those "AP peripherals" share one ~480 Mb/s connection.

[Kemosabe]

Hmm.. Why all the negative comments? I use my wandboard quad for browsing and as microserver (NAS,owncloud,pxe,git).
Atom need more power and is costs more... Sure it is x86 but i don't want to use it as full desktop pc...

[Chewi]

I acquired a Utilite Pro at the end of the year but haven't had a chance to really do anything with it yet. I've been polishing my soon-to-be-released cross-compiling scripts for building new Gentoo systems as that's what I'll be running on it. These benchmarks are certainly encouraging. Thanks, Michael.