Quad-Core ODROID-X Battles NVIDIA Tegra 3

[biebo]

NPB on OMP or MPI

How to know whether NPB benchmark is done using OMP or MPI?

[ldesnogu]

Run whatever you want as long as it's not using too much IO

Slowing down the Atom might not produce very fair results unless you can also clock down memory frequency. Anyway I guess your Atom has wider and faster memory than your ARM SoC. I'd really like to see some Medfield benchmarks as that is what is closest to ARM.

[ssvb]

Nice tests!

When will we see an Atom/Medfield vs Cortex-A9 battle again? I'm tired reading people claims that Medfield is faster even though I know it isn't

Are you interested in properly done Atom vs Cortex-A9 benchmarks? Or just any kind of weird benchmarks to keep the topic hot From what I have seen so far, Atom is actually not so bad if compared to Cortex-A8/Cortex-A9 and has very similar performance per MHz on integer code. The only problem with Atom is that Intel still can't pack as many cores as ARM into the same chip and keep power consumption reasonable.

I have an Atom N450 based netbook and can run some phoronix based benchmarks versus Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 if anybody is interested. Maybe even locking all of them to run at 1GHz to make it more "fair" and easier to compare.

[Michael]

I have some more benchmarks here... the suite keeps crashing at compile bench for some reason... will have to look at that...

It's probably best not to hit compilebench on the ARM hardware with SD cards since compilebench is rather write-intensive on the storage.

[SolarNet]

I have some more benchmarks here... the suite keeps crashing at compile bench for some reason... will have to look at that...

openbenchmarking.org/result/1208245-AR-1208223AR23

[ssvb]

Next test will be to fully engage the rest of the board and measure.

It would be interesting (and probably scary) if somebody could implement something like gpuburn-mali400 and run it on odroid-x together with cpuburn And kicking DMA to repeatedly copy something in the background could additionally stress the memory controller. But in any case, it is just a stress test for the cooling system. None of real applications is ever going to consume as much power.

[SolarNet]

Sweet. 11W normal with spikes to 12W... and that is in my hypercooled mineral oil bath to be safe (seriously, I'll take a picture). Next test will be to fully engage the rest of the board and measure. Might need to break the nitrogen out for that one...

Actually, I'm surprised at how stable it has been. I have only just now dropped it into the oil bath.

[SolarNet]

I will try this out... see if I can find the true peak power. I have some more benchmarks at

http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1208231-AR-1208150AR20

comparing a dual-core Exynos (Soft-float) to the quad-core Exynos (Hard-float)... the numbers aren't quite twice as good as I thought they would be. Worse PE / RAM ratio might be in play there... thanks...

[ssvb]

SS, were you running your OMAP4430 off of USB / OTG power on your original cpuburn test? I have heard that you can run current a bit above spec on the original Pandaboard (but not the 4460 ES). Still, I would be surprised it you can run it at ~300% above spec... I have had quite a bit of success with OTG power so I will give this a try on a Panda A2 generation.

No, I'm using a 5V power supply rated at 3A. OTG just can't provide enough current without violating USB spec. Even the idle system had ~550 mA current draw, which is already too much for OTG.

The power peaks I am seeing on ODROID-X seem to be during the c-ray PTS tests which peaks at 7W.

I bet you can run it a lot hotter with a cortex-a9 tuned cpuburn Just do the following and maybe run htop in another terminal or ssh session to verify that all 4 cores are fully loaded. I would not be surprised if the power consumption goes up to 10W or more, which should be easily measurable even with your apparently poor precision power meter:

$ wget https://raw.github.com/ssvb/ssvb.github.com/master/files/2012-04-10/ssvb-cpuburn-a9.S
$ gcc ssvb-cpuburn-a9.S
$ ./a.out

How are you getting your direct current measurements? I will instrument my boards if I find a good way to measure that...

Just a multimeter connected between the power supply and the 5V barrel jack on the board. Something similar to what is shown on the picture here.

[SolarNet]

SS, were you running your OMAP4430 off of USB / OTG power on your original cpuburn test? I have heard that you can run current a bit above spec on the original Pandaboard (but not the 4460 ES). Still, I would be surprised it you can run it at ~300% above spec... I have had quite a bit of success with OTG power so I will give this a try on a Panda A2 generation. The power peaks I am seeing on ODROID-X seem to be during the c-ray PTS tests which peaks at 7W. How are you getting your direct current measurements? I will instrument my boards if I find a good way to measure that...