Benchmarking ARM Tablets, Smart-Phones

When writing this morning about what's going on with Iveland and OpenBenchmarking.org, one of the recent items being worked on in this area completely escaped my mind: the mobile benchmarking improvements. Time and money (new hardware) has been spent in providing greater automated testing and performance benchmarking of the Phoronix Test Suite on ARM-based mobile devices.

For a year now there has been mobile Phoronix Test Suite support with Palm's WebOS and their phones along with other ARM-based devices that support Optware. There's also been some work done on the Android front, etc. Not all of the 130+ Phoronix Test Suite test profiles are supported on the ARM architecture and the stripped back hardware capabilities of current tablets and mobile devices, but there's a number of test profiles and suites that will run just fine.

With all of the recent attention though to ARM hardware on Linux by Linaro and other projects, along with a number of vendors asking about the Phoronix Test Suite on ARM, with Iveland there will be greater testing support and ARM-specific suites. Ångström Linux (the unified effort by the OpenZaurus, OpenEmbedded, and OpenSIMpad projects) also now has external dependencies support with the 3.0 release. The Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 release was even running on the Excito B3 (a Swedish low-powered ARM NAS/server).

Some of the most recent ARM hardware on the shopping list has been an Android tablet from Archos and the Nokia N900 smart-phone. With the N900 I'm in the process of bringing up the Phoronix Test Suite under Maemo 5, MeeGo 1.1 for the N900, and Easy Debian. The process has gone quite smoothly, aside from the MeeGo 1.1 N900 experience itself being quite poor.

This means there are also going to be some Nokia N900 benchmarks looking at different aspects of the system. I also hope to do a GCC vs. LLVM/Clang compiler comparison with this ARMv7 processor similar to the GCC, LLVM Clang, DragonEgg comparison done recently with the Intel Core i7 Gulftown, among other articles. Well, that is assuming I don't overheat another ARM device.