So, on a micro-level, the comparison is not terribly valid. On a macro-level -- saying that the devices are within an order of magnitude -- the results are reasonable, but certainly not novel...
According to cpu-world. The 2105 is 21% faster than the 530 for single threaded operations. If you account for the speed in clock this would mean only a boost of 14% improvement over the 530.
So its really not such a bad comparison.
In the meanwhile we will try run this on a newer CPU and let you know the results.
(Then they play some what-if games by underlocking the i3 in imaginative ways and applying SIMD opts to only the ARM side)
Forget the Core line chips. That's irrelevant. It will remain a cash cow for the next few years, but a rapidly shrinking cash cow nonetheless. They'll move upmarket with them, until there's nowhere to move to.
ARM chips' improvements over the next years will make them "good enough" for most people, and Intel's Core chips which cost 10x more (literally) will be very uncompetitive in that environment.
Their only solution is to fight with Atom, but so far no success there, and even if they succeed, it means their profits will lower dramatically, and they need to survive as a company with much lower revenue and profit, which means the "all-powerful Intel" of the past will be but a faint memory in the future.
If RAM access is needed ARM machines usually fall behind quickly, since they usually have much lower RAM bandwidth.
This is what Atom is all about, the higher power/performance x86 possible.
And You also cant scale a Mobile Devices up to a Server / Desktop Product.
That is what the ARMv8 Cortex A58 is all about, Low Power Desktop and Server Class.
So technically speaking both are marching towards each others end. Although Intel would lose out due to other factor such as business model.
http://www.inpai.com.cn/doc/hard/198143_8.htm
Page takes a while to load. Then scroll down to the benchmarks. Take a look at the single threaded Linpack benchmarks between i7@3.5GHz and Exynos@1.6GHz.
Assuming the compiler will generate good SSE code for the Intel CPU is a joke. If you write intrinsics for one arch, write it for both.
I'd bet money the Intel side could be made 2.5-3x faster with proper SSE intrinsics and maybe 5-6x faster with a Haswell i3 using AVX (SandyBridge doesn't have the cache bandwidth to fully utilise AVX properly).
We decided to report non-intrinsics version, because reporting the original OpenCV numbers with intrinsics as SSE optimized would be unfair to Intel. Apparently its not very well optimized.
My own guess is that if we add intrinsics for Intel to our own C code, it will boost by around 2x. We could have written a blog without reporting the Intel C optimized numbers, but that would have been unfair to Intel again.
It would be informative having the power used to process the same tasks compared.
So what was the power consumption in every reported run? What was when the i3 was underclocked?
We have applied SIMD optimizations only to ARM because thats our business. Licensing computer vision algorithms on ARM.
The blog is a by-product of that effort.
There's some evidence that the new Bay Trail Atom's should be pretty competitive against current ARM stuff.
Memory controllers(atleast the SOC(chip) level ones) are normally developed by the silicon vendor - like Nvidia, Broadcomm, Qualcomm, Samsung, TI, Freescale etc. Not ARM. And these companies have been working on it for many years. They have had graphics, video acceleration, display, camera-interface IPs all integrated into one SOC for almost a decade now. Intel is infact relatively new to this kind of integration.
In anycase everything including memory controllers, pipelining and superscalar has already been taken into account in this benchmark.
What has been left out is higher clocks and hyperthreading. Two things that ARM doesnt have yet.
On the other hand, Intel has better technology and could cannibalize itself. The future will be interesting.
You are right that the i3 CPU(Core i3-530) we compared with is a little old generation. I tried to compare online Core i3-530 with Core i3-2105. The 2105 is SandyBridge(couldnt find a direct comparison with an Ivy Bridge) and runs at a slightly higher clock 3.1 GHz(while the 530 runs at 2.93 according to CPU world).
According to cpu-world. The 2105 is 21% faster than the 530 for single threaded operations. If you account for the speed in clock this would mean only a boost of 14% improvement over the 530.
So its really not such a bad comparison.
In the meanwhile we will try run this on a newer CPU and let you know the results.
The thing is that ARM licenses its core, while Intel doesnt. ARM allows many many silicon vendors to do their own thing. Make their own server CPUs etc. Something they had never been able to do before.
I have no doubt that Intel will get competitive over time on the power front, if they are not already there yet. But people need to know that ARM is getting competitive on the performance front too. So that many silicon vendors, not just Intel, can come out with servers, and SOCs for other types of applications which is pure x86 right now.
Hallo admins, Ranjith is the author of the linked article!