A New MIPS Creator CI20 Is Running Much Better

The tests in this article are just focusing on the processor performance with saving a look at the PowerVR graphics for another day.

The performance is a bit lower than I anticipated for this dual-core 1.2GHz MIPS32 development board, while Alexandru Voica of Imagination later clarified that the performance is expected to be around that of the Raspberry Pi, Cubieboard 2, BeagleBone Black range. The Ingenic JZ4780 should be roughly comparable to a Cortex-A8 for performance.

It will be interesting to benchmark the CI20 with the latest GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers, try out some different MIPS32 tuning options, etc, for seeing how far this board can be pushed. I'm also told Imagination will be pushing down a major kernel update for the CI20 soon, which could result in greater performance.

At the end of the day this is a fun little MIPS development board. It's not the fastest out there, but for those wishing to experiment with MIPS32 / alternative architectures, it's fairly interesting. The price is also reasonable at around $65 USD; hopefully though in the future it will be complemented by a higher-end MIPS development board offering with greater performance.

Want to see how your own Linux system / development board compares in terms of performance? Simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and then run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1507248-BE-LOWPOWER063.