Freescale's i.MX6 SoC Smacks The Old Intel Atom Z530

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Freescale's i.MX6 SoC Smacks The Old Intel Atom Z530

For the past few weeks I've had the pleasure of playing with CompuLab's Utilite Computer. The Utilite is a miniature ARM desktop computer powered by Freescale's i.MX6 SoC and is running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. This is a speedy little Linux system that for some workloads can blow past Intel's original Atom Z530 "Poulsbo" SoC system...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTU4MjU

[alpha_one_x86]

And the power?

And the power? Because it's exactly what I hope to remplace my fit pc2 as router, but I need the power usage, mostly at different load.

[chuckula]

Newsflash!!!

Quad-core ARM SoC from 2014 can beat one of the original Atoms that was launched almost 6 years ago*!! At least in most benchmarks since even a 6-year old crippled Atom still managed to win in the Dolfyn benchmark run!!

Fortunately for ARM, Intel hasn't made a single improvement to Atom in 6 years, so these results are completely representative of exactly how Baytrail would perform against ARM....

In other news, water is wet, and Larabel likes to pretend that the leftover review units he gets to keep on hand are the only products in existence that represent certain manufacturers.


* http://ark.intel.com/products/35463

[Michael]

In other news, water is wet, and Larabel likes to pretend that the leftover review units he gets to keep on hand are the only products in existence that represent certain manufacturers.


* http://ark.intel.com/products/35463

If you RTFA, it says other benchmarks are forthcoming... This is just a preview for those curious, to know I have the Utilite review coming, and for those wishing to run their own PTS OB comparisons.

[Fresh_meat]

The i.MX6 quad soc looks very interesting regaring his computing power, but the problem, as often with the current avaliable, unexpensive and easy to find arm systems, is the lack of proper gigabyte network. The i.MX6 containt a dual gigabyte ethernet circuit, but it seems to be internaly bridged on the USB 2.0 controler, wich result at a top transfere rate of 480MBis (actually it seems more like 470MBis), and maybe it is even less if the the dual port are used together (I never see any benchs about it).

And that's pretty sad because it looks a very interesting soc but it can't be used to act as a NAS or anything needed too much bandwidth. Let's hope the situation will improve with the cortex A50 serie, as the saved space on the die and the reduced power consumption should, in a way or another, encourage soc designers to implement better integrated functionalities with the now free for use transistors ... like better ethernet support, cryptographic engins, RNGs, SRAM, NUMA controler, ...

One of the avaliable options for and ARM system with gigabyte ethernet (without relying on an external USB 3 to ethernet converter), is the cubieboard 3, wich come with a nice "open" box able to hold a 2.5" form factor HDD (so up to 2GB actually), sadly, the soc is an allwiner A20 and so that's basically two oldish A7 cores, so it's probably not the best choice for implementing a FSMO replacement cluster using Samba 4 for your small business

Maybe AMD will do with ARM what Intel is doing with its Itanium : sharing parts of the design between the Itaniums and Xeons, so, even if it's two different architectures, there will be able to produce them on the same socket, sharing some parts like caches, chipsets, ... It seems AMD's CPU chip since Bulldozer are very neat and flexible (why not swap the x86 processing modules by ARM ones and reprogram the ?code accordingly ? supposing it is that simple ...) That would be great to have better ARM processor in high volume on standard motherboards

[schmidtbag]

I own an UDOO which uses the same CPU. Unfortunately, the 3.0 kernel seems to be the only actively available one, which is missing a lot of drivers I need. The i.MX6 is nice, particularly because it's one of very few ARM platforms that supports OpenGL 2.0 and not just strictly GLES.

[Imroy]

Quad-core ARM SoC from 2014 can beat one of the original Atoms that was launched almost 6 years ago*!!

The Freescale i.MX6 is actually a late-2012 chip, it just took a while to show up in interesting products. A better comparison would be against something using the newer Cortex-A15-based chips, like the ODroid-XU.

[mcirsta]

The Freescale i.MX6 is actually a late-2012 chip, it just took a while to show up in interesting products. A better comparison would be against something using the newer Cortex-A15-based chips, like the ODroid-XU.

+1 to that. It's not like an [email protected] GHz is latest ARM can compete with.
And yes, Baytrail will kick the crap out of an A15 but you have to remember that current Baytrail chips are in a totally different power envelope. If you want to go on that path a 17W ULV Haswell CPU can probably wipe the floor with a Baytrail but again, it's also the power usage.
And while obvious I still think the article shows how far ARM has come. You have to remember that once upon a time ARM was making 200 MHz chips that could barely power a smartphone.

[liam]

Phoronix: Freescale's i.MX6 SoC Smacks The Old Intel Atom Z530

For the past few weeks I've had the pleasure of playing with CompuLab's Utilite Computer. The Utilite is a miniature ARM desktop computer powered by Freescale's i.MX6 SoC and is running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. This is a speedy little Linux system that for some workloads can blow past Intel's original Atom Z530 "Poulsbo" SoC system...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTU4MjU

The utilites are one of the machines that the Fedora arm folks recommend.
The cores are a pretty old arch cortex a9 (not sure which revision) but it works pretty much ootb.
I've been eyeing one of these since the RPI is just not powerful enough to run as a media front end. The vivante cores in these socs are actually surprisingly beefy and the CPU is miles more powerful all while not blowing through hugely more joules.

[liam]

The i.MX6 quad soc looks very interesting regaring his computing power, but the problem, as often with the current avaliable, unexpensive and easy to find arm systems, is the lack of proper gigabyte network. The i.MX6 containt a dual gigabyte ethernet circuit, but it seems to be internaly bridged on the USB 2.0 controler, wich result at a top transfere rate of 480MBis (actually it seems more like 470MBis), and maybe it is even less if the the dual port are used together (I never see any benchs about it).

And that's pretty sad because it looks a very interesting soc but it can't be used to act as a NAS or anything needed too much bandwidth. Let's hope the situation will improve with the cortex A50 serie, as the saved space on the die and the reduced power consumption should, in a way or another, encourage soc designers to implement better integrated functionalities with the now free for use transistors ... like better ethernet support, cryptographic engins, RNGs, SRAM, NUMA controler, ...

One of the avaliable options for and ARM system with gigabyte ethernet (without relying on an external USB 3 to ethernet converter), is the cubieboard 3, wich come with a nice "open" box able to hold a 2.5" form factor HDD (so up to 2GB actually), sadly, the soc is an allwiner A20 and so that's basically two oldish A7 cores, so it's probably not the best choice for implementing a FSMO replacement cluster using Samba 4 for your small business

Maybe AMD will do with ARM what Intel is doing with its Itanium : sharing parts of the design between the Itaniums and Xeons, so, even if it's two different architectures, there will be able to produce them on the same socket, sharing some parts like caches, chipsets, ... It seems AMD's CPU chip since Bulldozer are very neat and flexible (why not swap the x86 processing modules by ARM ones and reprogram the ?code accordingly ? supposing it is that simple ...) That would be great to have better ARM processor in high volume on standard motherboards

The a7 are brand new designs (unless you mean these aren't cortex series). Actually the a7 should be a perfect router chip as long as you don't need to perform anything too complicated.