ARM Cortex-A15 vs. NVIDIA Tegra 3 vs. Intel x86

For this comparison I ran the Chromebook with its Exynos 5 Dual against the NVIDIA "Cardhu" Tegra 3 developer tablet and then x86 systems with Intel Atom N270, Intel Atom Z530, Intel Atom D525, and Intel Core i3 330M processors. Having similar RAM/storage configurations were attempted where possible although the benchmark results being published are all processor focused. All tests were built from source via the Phoronix Test Suite on the respective platforms with the stock compiler flags/options.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was loaded up on all systems for this comparison. The stock kernels on each system were used. For the ARM hardware, the kernel version differs slightly with the ChrUbuntu packaging of the supported kernel being based upon Linux 3.4 and then NVIDIA's latest R16 Linux For Tegra release is still on the Linux 3.1.10 kernel. The same GCC 4.6 compiler version was fortunately available throughout.

For those that missed last week's Cortex-A15 benchmarks, the included comparison hardware was a TI OMAP4460 PandaBoard ES, Intel Atom D525, and quad-core Calxeda Highbank ARM Cortex-A9 servers.