The ARM Cortex-A9 Can Beat Out The Intel Atom

[chuckula]

Anyways back to the tests, anyone else find it weird that Atom under 64 bit overall did worse? Any particular reason for that?

I could see issues with x86_64 dues to things like the pressure on the instruction cache and possibly the data cache if there are a lot of memory pointers. There are architectural advantages to x86_64 in higher-end Intel parts (think Sandy Bridge & Ivy Bridge) but in an Atom the simple in-order instructions and less sophisticated front-end may negate many of these advantages.

[schmidtbag]

Clock speed is useless, too.
Compare something relevant, like power consumption or price.

While I agree it would be helpful to see more info, clock speed is relevant when you consider that A9 is RISC, A9 systems tend to be cheaper than Atom systems, and from what I recall A9 is slightly more power efficient.

Clock speed by itself doesn't matter, as AMD has proven back in the Athlon 64 and P4 days. However, generally speaking, the higher the frequency, the more power consuming something is and the more heat it produces. Since ARM and Atom chips are designed to be low power and potentially fanless, being at the same frequency is a decent comparison, just to see which really is more efficient clock per clock.

@kano
Not true at all. Forcing something to go beyond its designated limit can't be compared to weakening something (or not pushing it to its limits). When you dumb down the Atom, that would actually give it the benefit, since it would be running cooler. That's like comparing a sedan to a F1 racer - its a lot easier to test road performance if the F1 slows down to the speeds of a sedan, since the sedan can't go as fast as the F1. If you want to make any semblance of a comparison, you have to compensate for the lowest denominator, not the highest.

Anyways back to the tests, anyone else find it weird that Atom under 64 bit overall did worse? Any particular reason for that?

[Kano]

Well the benchmark is a bit useless because a atom n450 usually runs with 1.66 ghz. so the cortex cpu needs first a higher clockspeed to match the atom. btw. there are also quad core atoms out there.

[pankkake]

Clock speed is useless, too.
Compare something relevant, like power consumption or price.

[chuckula]

This article is severely flawed...

Running multi-threaded benchmarks on a top of the line dual-core ARM setup then declaring that it is amazingly superior to an UNDERCLOCKED SINGLE CORE ATOM FROM ALMOST 3 YEARS AGO is not exactly showing that Intel is about to go out of business.

Larabel *repeatedly* misrepresents the N450 calling it a "dual core" processor. It is *not* dual core but is a single core + HT chip. He could have spent 5 seconds using this new thing called "Google" to go here: http://ark.intel.com/products/42503 and get a full product page describing the N450 that *clearly* shows it is a single core chip. I'd love to see the A9's "beating" the N450 with only one core....

[Figueiredo]

The problem with Tegra is that it is Nvidia.
So no open source device drivers.

I believe thats the problem with any arm soc vendor, contrary to, ironically, intel's next gen valleyview soc.

[gigaplex]

The problem with Tegra is that it is Nvidia.
So no open source device drivers.

That applies to pretty much all ARM SoCs at the moment.

[uid313]

Tegra 3 with its quad-core @ up to 1.7GHz should be a viable Atom replacement for sure.

The problem with Tegra is that it is Nvidia.
So no open source device drivers.

[Sacha]

They are already used in nettops, netbooks and chromebooks :P

Tegra 3 with its quad-core @ up to 1.7GHz should be a viable Atom replacement for sure.
Give my Transformer Prime a decent Ubuntu distro and let's see what happens.

[uid313]

Great

This ARM Cortex-A9 would be great for a nettop, netbook, and chromebook or chrometop.