Running ARM Linux Benchmarks On The HP TouchPad

While Hewlett-Packard recently announced they will be killing off their webOS devices, just days prior to that I had ordered an HP TouchPad 16GB to carry out some additional ARM-based Linux benchmarks. Although HP's devices may be going away, I am still fond of webOS and it's a fair environment to carry out performance tests.

In early August when leaving the Phoronix meet-up in Oslo Norway for the Berlin Desktop Summit, there was a Woot.com sale that day on the Hewlett-Packard TouchPad 16GB for a price just around $370 USD, which at the time was a bargain for this webOS-enabled device that originally carried a $499 retail price-tag. For the price of the ARM tablet and running something besides Google's Android, it's an interesting target for benchmarking. Following the 2011 Desktop Summit was then LinuxCon North America in Vancouver, so even before I got back to opening the TouchPad box in Chicago, HP announced they would be discontinuing the tablet and their smart-phones. As many know, following HP's announcement they dropped the price of their 16GB tablet to just $99 USD and the 32GB model at $149, in order to clear out their inventory. Alas, not everything works out, as it would have been buying a small stack of the TouchPads to create an ARM test farm all at the price of the Woot.com sale just days earlier.

Even before Hewlett-Packard acquired Palm, I added basic compatibility to the Phoronix Test Suite so that the test client could run under webOS on their smart-phones in 2009/2010. WebOS was nice for being more open and Linux-like than Android while also allowing Optware packages to be easily installed. Phoronix Test Suite on webOS worked well, except their smart-phones were not too particularly intriguing for running demanding performance tests on. That was the case until HP announced the TouchPad earlier this year. The TouchPad has a Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 APQ8060 dual-core 1.2GHz ARM CPU, Qualcomm Adreno 220 core graphics, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of storage (there's also the 32GB model), and is running webOS 3.0.0/3.0.2.