Benchmarking Ubuntu Linux On The Google Nexus 10
More cores are helpful to the OpenMP-based N-Queens test. It will be interesting to see how the Exynos 5 Octa performs in comparison.
With the Samsung Exynos 5 Octa, NVIDIA Tegra 4, and other quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 hardware on the horizon, the ARM Linux performance will become even more interesting in the next few months. In terms of the hardware we have to play with today, the Exynos 5 Dual as found in the Nexus 10 and Chromebook continues to be competitive, especially considering its low power budget. For most of the computational benchmarks, the Google Nexus 10 tablet was much faster than the NVIDIA Tegra 3 Tablet (quad-core Cortex-A9), extremely faster than the dual-core OMAP4460, and generally faster than the Intel Atom 330 "Diamondville" processor.
For a surprising number of tests, the Exynos 5 Dual / Nexus 10 was even competing with the Phenom 9500 "Agena" Quad-Core 2.2GHz CPU, AMD's original Phenom CPU that brings with it a 95 Watt TDP. Another bit of a surprise was the cost of running Ubuntu Touch with its low-level Android/CyanogenMod layer and Ubuntu chroot rather than using a clean Linux environment (as with the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook).
Coming up in March once working through the Ubuntu Nexus 7 issues, the results from the Google Nexus 7 tablet running Ubuntu will be shared. With that comparison that builds upon today's results will also be data points for the Tegra 2 dual-core Trim-Slice and likely other low-power/mobile Intel/AMD hardware too.
As mentioned already, when diving closer into strictly comparing tablets or ARM devices where measurements can be done in a more fair and accurate manner, the performance-per-Watt data will also come into play.
If you would like such pure ARM Linux benchmarking to continue, such as with the Google Nexus 4 and its Snapdragon S4 Pro 1.7GHz Quad-Core Krait, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium (a benefit that allows ad-free viewing and viewing entire articles on a single-page) and/or making a PayPal tip/donation. Including the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10, the ARM hardware benchmarked thoroughly on Phoronix often needs to be purchased but isn't supplied by the vendors as samples. In dealing with most of these ARM vendors, they're namely just interested in Android data but not any independent Linux findings. Benchmarking this low-power hardware is also rather time intensive, with Phoronix being the sole source for such extensive ARM Linux hardware benchmarks.
Additional Linux hardware test requests and be feedback is welcome within the forums, emailing me, or @MichaelLarabel on Twitter.
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