TI OMAP4660 ARM Cortex-A9 PandaBoard ES Benchmarks

The first computational test to look at between the PandaBoard ES and the various Intel CPUs is the Dhrystone 2 performance from the BYTE Unix Benchmark. With the Dhrystone 2 test, the Atom N270 and Atom Z530 are about 58% faster than the development board with its dual-core ARM Cortex-A9. The old Core Duo and Pentium M were both 2~3 times faster than the latest ARM development board. Of course, the Pentium M and Core Duo are all several generations old Intel mobile CPUs.

With the CacheBench read test, the PandaBoard ES manages to pull well in front of the Atom N270 and Z530 Poulsbo. The development board with the Texas Instruments ARM platform was nearly 40% faster. The OLPC XO-1.75 also ran with CacheBench, but its performance was very slow. The PandaBoard ES also remained not competitive to the Core Duo T2400 or Pentium M 1.86GHz.

The PandaBoard ES was also a winner against the N270/Z530 Atoms when it came to the write test in CacheBench, but this is a synthetic test.

With the read/modify/write combination, however, the ARM's performance fell behind the first-generation Intel Atoms.