ARM outperforms Atom in benchmark, watch for the business model for benchmark companies

Anyone who has been in the tech industry knows to take benchmarks statements “with a grain of salt.”  Linley group has a post on the ARM outmuscling the Atom processor.

ARM Outmuscles Atom on Benchmark

ARM—and, for that matter, MIPS—CPUs outperform Intel’s Atom, at least as measured by the CoreMark benchmark when normalized for frequency. ARM rates its Cortex-A9 at 2.9 CoreMark per MHz (CM/MHz), whereas Atom running a single instance of the benchmark achieves only 1.8 CM/MHz. In fact, all of the single-thread CPUs profiled in Table 1 outperform Atom in terms of per-clock performance.

Linley provides a table.

The business plug is to buy Linley’s report.  So, their motivation is to sell research, not to support research paid for by Intel, ARM, or a vendor.

In our latest report on CPU IP, we look further at the midrange and high-end CPU cores from ARM, MIPS, and others, including both household names and obscure companies, such as IBM and Beyond Semiconductor. The report compares not just performance but also die area, power consumption, and microarchitecture features. As the above comparison highlights, levels of CPU performance that were once the province of PC processors are now available for system-on-chip designs. When combined with the latest DSP, video decoding, and graphics technology, these CPUs imbue consumer electronics and communications systems with capabilities far beyond what seemed conceivable a few years ago. --Joe

Joseph Byrne, senior analyst

The sentence above that gets people’s attention is this one.

As the above comparison highlights, levels of CPU performance that were once the province of PC processors are now available for system-on-chip designs.

The competition that will be interesting us in the Data Center space is SeaMicro (Intel Atom) vs. Smooth-Stone (ARM).

As James Hamilton mentions in his blog.

Over the past year I’ve met with both Smooth Stone and SeaMicro frequently and it’s great to see more information about both available broadly. The very low power server trend is real and advancing quickly. When purchasing servers, it needs to be all about work done per dollar and work done per joule.

Comments

[CPU Architect]

Performance per GHz is a useless metric when comparing different ISAs or even different microarchitectures within the same ISA. Ask Linley about Brainiacs vs Speed Demons. Or compare Intel pentium 4 to Pentium III.

Look at perf/watt, perf/w$, and perf/watt/$ at the platform level and not just the CPU!