Linux Benchmarks Of The C.H.I.P. $9 Computer

While Next Thing Co is still working to fulfill orders on the C.H.I.P. $9 computer over the next several months, I noticed that some benchmarks of this cheap Raspberry Pi competitor have begun appearing on OpenBenchmarking.org via the Phoronix Test Suite. Here are some of those benchmark results for this ARB single-board computer.

For those that don't recall this crowd-funding campaign, the C.H.I.P. is a $9 computer with a 1GHz ARM single-core processor, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of storage. The C.H.I.P. is cheap. I hadn't paid much attention to the campaign since I'm more into high-performance ARM chips than whatever the cheapest ARM SBC is around. However, these early benchmark results on OpenBenchmarking.org are rather interesting.

There have been a few results with a "NextThing C.H.I.P" running Debian 8 with the Linux 4.3 kernel and Xfce desktop. The most interesting result file so far is probably this set of results.

Faster than the ~$35-ish Raspberry Pi 2? Seems almost too good to be true.

With the OpenSSL compute benchmark it's performing around the speed of an original Raspberry Pi.

Okay, just in lucky situations was the C.H.I.P. running close to the Pi 2. Nevertheless, the performance isn't that bad for being a $9 open-source board using an Allwinner SoC.

Again, if you want to dig through some early, independent results of the C.H.I.P. there is this result file. Take the results as you wish for now since they were done independently and there are some software differences between the tested SBCs. If I end up getting a C.H.I.P. in the test labs I'll be sure to run a lot more, side-by-side interesting ARM Linux benchmarks. If you missed it from last month, you may be interested in this 8-way ARM Linux board benchmark comparison.