Intel Quark SoC x86 Platform Support For Linux 3.20/4.0?

[makomk]

I updated my OpenSSL performance comparison with rPi2 data. It's relevant here because it's got quark data in it. Quick summary, everything beats the quark badly.

I'm not surprised. The Quark is basically a 486 with support for Pentium-era instructions bolted on so that it can actually run newer OSes. It's a late-80s CISC design tying to compete with 21st-century RISC designs, and naturally it loses pretty badly both in terms of performance-per-clock and overall performance. I mean, even the tiny $4 ARM Cortex-M3 embedded board sitting on my desk right now has single-cycle integer multiply but the Quark takes something like 5 cycles because it's such an ancient design.

[willmore]

I updated my OpenSSL performance comparison with rPi2 data. It's relevant here because it's got quark data in it. Quick summary, everything beats the quark badly.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-Vj_dDprH1sazhXUnc0TDZvQUU/view?usp=sharing

I added a 'normalized by Mhz' value so we can compare it clock-for-clock. Note, that 'clock for clock' doesn't include memory performance. Faster cores get penalized in that sense as memory performance doesn't scale as processor clock scales.

[toyotabedzrock]

This chip is a power hog and I'm not sure they could give them away. It might be useful to run a smart washing machine or dishwasher but that is about it. And even then 2.2 watts would likely mean it can't get energy star certified.

[JS987]

One core ARM on 400MHz compared? Intel's Quark is like AMD's Geode processors or such... those are for embedded market - mostly for one specific task only... Hmmmm, might be it is good time for commercial

compared to ARM with similar price and power consumption

[dungeon]

That CPU is pointless with 10 times lower performance in average compared to ARM.

One core ARM on 400MHz compared? Intel's Quark is like AMD's Geode processors or such... those are for embedded market - mostly for one specific task only... Hmmmm, might be it is good time for commercial

[JS987]

That CPU is pointless with 10 times lower performance in average compared to ARM.

[Modu]

I'm just curious how will this SoC will be a deterministic system while running on a Linux kernel? 2.5W power consumption is huge for projects that run on battery. Mimicking Arduino IDE won't put this SoC in MCU's category IMO. It's even not cheap to use it as an inter MCU communication or networking CPU. MIPS based router SoC's with OpenWRT are my choice. They are cheap, low power, easy to supply from market and has drivers ready to use. What is the point of this thingy? Am I missing something?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Quark SoC x86 Platform Support For Linux 3.20/4.0?

Ingo Molnar has asked Linus Torvalds to pull the x86 platform support for Intel Quark SoC systems for the Linux 3.20/4.0 kernel...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-Quark-SoC-Linux-4.0