TI OMAP4660 ARM Cortex-A9 PandaBoard ES Benchmarks

The performance of the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 OMAP4460 configuration as found on the PandaBoard ES is quite commendable and in this Phoronix review the dual-core 1.2GHz ARM system with PowerVR SGX540 graphics is being compared to several Intel Atom, Pentium M, and Core Duo configurations running Ubuntu Linux throughout. To spice things up, the pre-production OLPC XO-1.75 was also thrown into the testing mix with its single-core ARMv7 800MHz Sheeva processor.

The PandaBoard ES was recently released as an updated OMAP4 PandaBoard with the OMAP4460 processor from Texas Instruments. The sub-$200 (USD) development board features two ARM Cortex-A9 (M3) cores that can clock up to 1.2GHz, compared to the dual-core 1GHz cores on the original PandaBoard with the TI OMAP4430. The PandaBoard ES also has support for Bluetooth low-energy technology, Display Serial Interface (DSI) and then HDMI (v1.3), DVI-D, and DPI outputs as found on the original PandaBoard.

The notorious PowerVR SGX540 graphics on the OMAP4460 PandaBoard ES allow for OpenGL ES 2.0 support (assuming you're using a supported closed-source driver), there's 1GB of LPDDR2 DRAM system memory, WiLink 6.0, and dual USB 2.0 ports. Like the original PandaBoard and various other ARM development boards, the hardware design is open-source.

The new PandaBoard ES is software-compatible with the original PandaBoard. There's working ports of Ubuntu and Android to the OMAP4 PandaBoard along with an in-development port of openSUSE, among other Linux environments.