Ubuntu 12.10 Sets To Make ARM Even Stronger

The performance of the popular C-Ray benchmark is significantly better with the Ubuntu 12.10 operating system, but for Smallpt the performance is unchanged.

Ubuntu 12.10 is still very early in development with its first testing milestone not having surfaced yet, but so far the ARM performance -- at least as it concerns the Texas Instruments OMAP4460 -- is looking extremely positive. Most of the performance gains shown in this article are likely attributed to the GCC 4.7 compiler upgrade while the move to the newer Linux 3.4 kernel may have also benefited the overall performance. Still to happen is that Canonical will move to the Linux 3.5 kernel for Ubuntu 12.10 or even possibly the Linux 3.6 kernel, which will hopefully yield some more tangible benefits and not any further regressions.

Aside from the few performance regressions shown in this article, the only other PandaBoard ES complaint I have regarding Ubuntu 12.10 at this time is the graphics performance using the OMAPDRM driver and xf86-video-fbdev. Compared to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with Linux 3.2, the overall graphics performance of the stock OMAP4460 driver appears much more sluggish and less fluid.

This increasingly compelling performance out of the OMAP4460 PandaBoard ES from Texas Instruments comes while the performance envelope of the system is at just about five Watts under load. During idling the power consumption was about four Watts. There are a few power consumption results for the PandaBoard ES on the Ubuntu 12.10 installation in this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. A performance-per-Watt comparison putting the TI OMAP4460 against other ARM and x86 platforms is forthcoming on Phoronix. There's even some more interesting ARM Linux tests than this that will be on Phoronix soon from a to-be-built cluster.