Linux Benchmarks Of The C.H.I.P. $9 Computer

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 5 February 2016 at 08:52 AM EST. 5 Comments
HARDWARE
While Next Thing Co is still working to fulfill orders on the C.H.I.P. $9 computer over the next several months, I noticed that some benchmarks of this cheap Raspberry Pi competitor have begun appearing on OpenBenchmarking.org via the Phoronix Test Suite. Here are some of those benchmark results for this ARB single-board computer.

For those that don't recall this crowd-funding campaign, the C.H.I.P. is a $9 computer with a 1GHz ARM single-core processor, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of storage. The C.H.I.P. is cheap. I hadn't paid much attention to the campaign since I'm more into high-performance ARM chips than whatever the cheapest ARM SBC is around. However, these early benchmark results on OpenBenchmarking.org are rather interesting.

There have been a few results with a "NextThing C.H.I.P" running Debian 8 with the Linux 4.3 kernel and Xfce desktop. The most interesting result file so far is probably this set of results.
ARM-SBC-Benchmarks-RPI-B-Plus

Faster than the ~$35-ish Raspberry Pi 2? Seems almost too good to be true.
ARM-SBC-Benchmarks-RPI-B-Plus

With the OpenSSL compute benchmark it's performing around the speed of an original Raspberry Pi.
ARM-SBC-Benchmarks-RPI-B-Plus

Okay, just in lucky situations was the C.H.I.P. running close to the Pi 2. Nevertheless, the performance isn't that bad for being a $9 open-source board using an Allwinner SoC.
ARM-SBC-Benchmarks-RPI-B-Plus

Again, if you want to dig through some early, independent results of the C.H.I.P. there is this result file. Take the results as you wish for now since they were done independently and there are some software differences between the tested SBCs. If I end up getting a C.H.I.P. in the test labs I'll be sure to run a lot more, side-by-side interesting ARM Linux benchmarks. If you missed it from last month, you may be interested in this 8-way ARM Linux board benchmark comparison.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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