The Cortex-A15 Continues Running Strong On Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 9 December 2012 at 01:15 PM EST. 10 Comments
HARDWARE
Over the past several weeks of running the Samsung Chromebook with its Exynos 5 Dual SoC that is comprised of an ARM Cortex-A15 dual-core processor, I've grown quite fond of this latest ARM processor.

In the compiler benchmarks and extensively comparing it to the NVIDIA Tegra 3 and Intel x86 CPUs, the ARM Cortex-A15 has held its grown and competed very well. The A15 blows away the older Cortex-A9s and ARM's claims that it's 40% faster core-for-core clock-for-clock than the A9 is not just marketing fluff.

The Exynos 5 Dual is clocked at 1.7GHz with two cores while I'm quite looking forward to NVIDIA's Tegra 4 "Wayne" that will be quad-core up to 2.0GHz when they debut early next year along with a better NVIDIA GPU integrated onto the SoC. There's also the Texas Instruments OMAP5 chips that are expected to run at 2.0GHz but will be packing just two cores and sticking to PowerVR graphics.

Anyhow, for those interested in more ARM Linux benchmarks, specifically on Ubuntu, I've made some more results available this weekend. This latest round of ARM performance benchmarks are from the Samsung Chromebook with its Exynos 5 Dual while still comparing it to the NVIDIA Tegra 3 "Cardhu" tablet quad-core. What's different this time around besides new and different benchmarks is that both Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 12.10 were tested on the Tegra 3. There's still the same kernel that's flashed onto the NVIDIA tablet, but the user-land is updated for Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal to provide another data point.

If you want to see how your x86 or ARM Linux device compares to the NVIDIA Tegra tablet and Samsung Chromebook, it's simply a matter of installing the Phoronix Test Suite and then executing phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1212087-RA-TEGRACORT38 to conduct a fully automated side-by-side comparison.

Embedded below are some of the highlights from this latest ARM Cortex-A15 Linux benchmarking while all of the results and other system data in full is available from this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.
Samsung ARM Cortex A15 Dual vs. NVIDIA Tegra 3
Samsung ARM Cortex A15 Dual vs. NVIDIA Tegra 3
Samsung ARM Cortex A15 Dual vs. NVIDIA Tegra 3
Samsung ARM Cortex A15 Dual vs. NVIDIA Tegra 3
Samsung ARM Cortex A15 Dual vs. NVIDIA Tegra 3
Samsung ARM Cortex A15 Dual vs. NVIDIA Tegra 3
Samsung ARM Cortex A15 Dual vs. NVIDIA Tegra 3
Continue to OpenBenchmarking.org for the rest.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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