[GUIDE] Smartphone CPU Guide

[KGreb]

I work with a lot of ARM CPUs, so I'll throw in my $0.02.

Be careful when trying to use Dhrystone MIPS (DMIPS) to gauge performance. DMIPS/MHz, as published by ARM, is a measure only of CPU performance on a nearly ideal memory subsystem. It is very common to see a 25%+ difference in two SoCs designed with the same CPU due to the tuning of interconnect (internal busses) and memory controllers in each design and for each application. Summary - ok for CPU to CPU comparison, bad for device to device.

You may wish to take a look at some benchmarks which take device performance including memory subsystem into account. An example is EEMBC CoreMark, which is a newer benchmark intended to become a replacement for Dhrystone. http://www.eembc.org has more info.

Instruction set for listed CPUs is ARM v7A; note there are also v7R and v7M profiles for other Cortex cores.

Last comment - if you also include PMPs, the OMAP 3430 was shipping from September 2008. To my knowledge this was the first Cortex A8 based silicon available.

[CrowdAds]

[Jprone]

Originally Posted by KGreb

I work with a lot of ARM CPUs, so I'll throw in my $0.02.

Be careful when trying to use Dhrystone MIPS (DMIPS) to gauge performance. DMIPS/MHz, as published by ARM, is a measure only of CPU performance on a nearly ideal memory subsystem. It is very common to see a 25%+ difference in two SoCs designed with the same CPU due to the tuning of interconnect (internal busses) and memory controllers in each design and for each application. Summary - ok for CPU to CPU comparison, bad for device to device.

You may wish to take a look at some benchmarks which take device performance including memory subsystem into account. An example is EEMBC CoreMark, which is a newer benchmark intended to become a replacement for Dhrystone. http://www.eembc.org has more info.

Instruction set for listed CPUs is ARM v7A; note there are also v7R and v7M profiles for other Cortex cores.

Last comment - if you also include PMPs, the OMAP 3430 was shipping from September 2008. To my knowledge this was the first Cortex A8 based silicon available.

Interesting stuff!

Mobile phone benchmarking is going to be a whole new can of worms for reviewers and consumers to look at when considering a phone... Especially if Sony Ericsson bridges the gap between phones and mobile gaming systems with the rumored PSP phone.... I want a frakking game pad to play games on my phone!

I just wonder how it's all going to play out. >_<! With all the cell phone companies making a new Android handset every 4-5 months (or less it seems..) it gets extremely hard to want to hold on to one phone for a long period of time.

I can't wait to see what 2011 brings in terms of performance. There's some impressive graphics in mobile games.

You should elaborate more on what specifically you do with ARM CPU's though! It's not something one typically hears about.

[medion]

We all knew that my theoretical benchmarks were off. However, I was shocked to see by just how much. The general order of things is correct, IE, Snapdragon > Hummingbird > OMAP in terms of CPU performance. But the gap between snapdragon and everyone else is just massive.