Apr 162010
 

A central component of my ARM versus x86 report published last week on Bright Side of News* was my miniBench benchmark.  For that analysis, I ported miniBench to Linux for both x86 and ARM ISAs.

The ARM project can now be downloaded here.  You will need the Code::Blocks IDE to manage the GCC C++ project.  Code::Blocks is available from the Ubuntu repositories so it is very easy to install.  Of course, you will also need to minimally install gcc, g++ and gdb.

The miniBench x86 project is available here.  The x86 Linux binary is here and the ARM binary is here.

I will merge the x86 and ARM projects and upload them to SourceForge shortly.

  2 Responses to “ARM miniBench project is ready for download”

  1. Intel is going to realize very soon the mistake it made in selling off its ARM division to Marvell in 2006. Of course, this is just my opinion. I could be wrong.

  2. Hi Rick,

    Before writing the BSN* report, I was skeptical of ARM’s chances against x86. Several years ago when I worked for Centaur I benchmarked an Intel XScale part and compared its performance with a VIA C7. The C7 completely destroyed the Intel ARM derivative, and the C7 is a very simple, scalar, in-order x86 core.

    However, the ARM Cortex-A8 was very competitive on integer tests against much stouter x86 opponents. However, ARM floating-point performance must be improved.

    For the Intel Atom, power consumption was much higher than the ARM Cortex-A8 even on identical tasks where both chips were performing at the same level.

    ARM versus x86 will be a very interesting clash of opposing CPU design philosophies.

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