Cortex-A8 vs Coppermine – Obsession with Handheld Computers

Samples description

I made a few benchmarks of two devices:

The Pandora device (based on OMAP3530).
A PC with 256 Mb SDR RAM and one of the following CPUs: Pentium 3 and
Celeron.

Both systems used the same gcc-4.4.3 and glibc-2.11.2.
Whole systems were compiled with the following flags:

PC flags:

CFLAGS="-O2 -march=native -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"

Global USE includes sse and mmxю ffmpeg’s use uncludes mmxext.

OMAP flags:

CFLAGS="-O2 -march=armv7-a -mtune=cortex-a8 -mfpu=neon -mfloat-abi=softfp -ftree-vectorize -fomit-frame-pointer"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"

OMAP’s DSP was not used.

Legend

OMAP@600 is OMAP3530 running at 600Mhz (default for Pandora).
OMAP@850 is OMAP3530 overclocked to 850Mhz.
P3@600/133 is Pentium 3 EB (the Coppermine core) running at 600 Mhz (FSB clocked at 133Mhz).
Cel@600/66 is Celeron (the Coppermine-128 core) running at 600 Mhz (FSB clocked at 66Mhz).

Compilation

I want to emphasize that it is not a performance benchmark, because compilation is done for different architectures (ARM and x86). It is a benchmark of one particular task, which is essential for gentoo users.

package	OMAP@600	OMAP@850	P3@600/133	Cel@600/66
binutils-2.20.1, m:s	37:50	28:45	20:06	28:23
glibc-2.11.2, m:s	177:27	138:19	104:09	145:16

OMAP3530 overclocked to 850 Mhz is very close to Celeron running at 600 Mhz.

Nbench

Nbench is a synthetic performance test.

The used version: nbench-2.2.3-r1

index	OMAP@600	OMAP@850	P3@600/133	Cel@600/66
memory	3.040	4.364	2.811	2.745
integer	3.073	4.365	2.761	2.751
floating-point	0.533	0.761	5.477	5.268

Nbench does not show any difference between Pentium 3 and Celeron, which is strange.

MPlayer

MPlayer was used to measure video decoding time.
The used version: mplayer-1.0_rc4_p20091026-r1
Command line:

mplayer -benchmark -vo null -nosound input_file

Input files: Big Buck Bunny at 480p in MPEG4, H.264 and Theora/Vorbis.

codec	OMAP@600	OMAP@850	P3@600/133	Cel@600/66
FFmpeg H.264, s	546.3	409.5	221.1	369.9
FFmpeg MSMPEG-4, s	175.3	128.1	98.4	130.2
Theora, s	497.9	367.8	256.2	322.7

FFmpeg

FFmpeg was used for encoding MPEG4 to Theora/Vorbis.
The used version: ffmpeg-0.5_p20373
Command line:

time ffmpeg -i input_file.avi -vcodec libtheora -acodec libvorbis \
-vb 1024k -s 640:360 output_file.ogv

Input files: Big Buck Bunny, Sintel trailer.

movie	OMAP@600	OMAP@850	P3@600/133	Cel@600/66
big buck bunny, m:s	143:21	102:38	43:45	47:51
sintel trailer, m:s	13:39	9:48	3:59	4:30

Compression

The used tools: bzip2-1.0.5-r1, gzip-1.4
Command lines:

time bzip2 big_buck_bunny_480p_stereo.avi
time gzip big_buck_bunny_480p_stereo.avi

Input files: big_buck_bunny_480p_stereo.avi

compressor	OMAP@600	OMAP@850	P3@600/133	Cel@600/66
bzip2, m:s	6:48	5:17	6:08	7:45
gzip, m:s	1:55	1:39	0:53	1:42

Hashing

The used tools: coreutils-8.5
Command lines:

time md5 big_buck_bunny_480p_stereo.avi
time sha256 big_buck_bunny_480p_stereo.avi
time sha512 big_buck_bunny_480p_stereo.avi