The ClearFog ARM ITX Workstation Performance Is Looking Very Good

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The ClearFog ARM ITX Workstation Performance Is Looking Very Good

If there's one Arm hardware launch I am looking forward to this year of known products in the pipeline, it would certainly be SolidRun's ClearFog mini-ITX workstation product...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...earFog-ARM-ITX

[wizard69]

That is very interesting. Frankly some of those numbers are so good you should have an AMD or Intel board in the graph mix. This is obviously a different class of performance.

[SyXbiT]

Impressive results.
i wish fringe stuff like this used the latest and greatest. This ARM core is several years out of date.

[boeroboy]

This is too cool. Great NAS box if you're lucky enough to have 10gbe. Any word on power consumption?

[milkylainen]

The 2160A is the ultra-highend QorIQ (Layerscape) for ARM platforms. It is not surprising that it performs well.
I am glad NXP decided to ditch a successor of the overly complex and non-generic PPC T4240.
The T4240's non-existent data prefetcher made it horrible in single threaded performance.
That issue is handily fixed by the A72 cores. That being said, the 2160A has been in the works since 2015 something...
The churn rate for NXP is way to slow. As a top-end CPU offering, the A72s needs to be replaced already.

[milkylainen]

This is too cool. Great NAS box if you're lucky enough to have 10gbe. Any word on power consumption?

https://www.nxp.com/products/process...cessor:LX2160A


Should give you a starting value on consumption.

[Guest]

I would love to see how this board stacks up against x86 hardware, and how mitigation affect its performance compared to Intel and AMD chips.

So far it looks like 2019 is THE year of Linux on ARM. Hardware is popping up, and it looks like the Android nightmare is ending, more and more chips have mainline support.

[elatllat]

Odd that the SBCs I would compare that to are not on the list;
ROCKPro64(RK3399), ODROID-N2(S922X)
and because they are 1/10 the price I'd expect a $/performance cluster comparison.

[phoron]

Sorry if I'm being a bit repetitive in every thread I post. Any idea of any blobs required to run? Is there some signed bootloader or some such (or can the buyer set up his own keys if there is?). Do peripherals work without loading proprietary firmware ? If one would deblob u-boot (if needed) and install linux-libre what would work and what not ? I mean from another thread the solidrun people seem nice and open, and NXP is decent as far as I know (i.MX6quad for instance only needed firmware for SDMA and it even runs without it). It's just the mainstream trend is towards more blobs, and it would be nice to have some chart (for every board, really, not just this one) like [blob, singed?, boots without it?, features not working without it] or something. In my dreams every vendor would just go to a self-assesment for RYF compliance and publish the results even if they fail, so that buyers know which points pass and which fail. And in case they would all pass then ask for FSF certification or just say "we think we could get if we tried".

[linux4kix]

Odd that the SBCs I would compare that to are not on the list;
ROCKPro64(RK3399), ODROID-N2(S922X)
and because they are 1/10 the price I'd expect a $/performance cluster comparison.

That was a requested benchmark by someone on twitter. I have also posted benchmarks against the other ARM servers and workstations. https://openbenchmarking.org/result/...v=ClearFog-ITX , https://openbenchmarking.org/result/...v=ClearFog-ITX

Note that this is a 2Ghz configuration. The shipping chip will be 2.2Ghz and we have a stable OC at 2.4Ghz that I will be posting new benchmarks against.