Remix.run Logo
▲ winrid a day ago

Quick someone upload a passmark score

Probably a little faster than a Pentium 3

▲BadlyDrawnBoy a day ago | parent [-]

The C906 core that runs Linux on the BL808 SoC on this device has roughly the same integer performance as a P3 on a per Mhz basis. The C906 is about 2.4 DMIPS / Mhz and the P3 is roughly 2.4 (Katmai core) - 2.8 (Tualatin core) DMPIS / Mhz depending on the version. You are looking at roughly P3 450 integer performance

Its an interesting comparison that Im not sure reflects positively on the RISC-V C906 core when you factor in core area and process nodes and core area, 22nm vs 250nm. Even if we choose the worst case scenario for the P3 cores to compare which would be the Katmai core. We are basically look at ~parity with a 30 year old core design

C906 core only @ 22nm = ~0.6 mm2

C906 core only @ 250nm = ~78 mm2 (geometric transform)

P3 core only @ 22nm = ~0.5 mm2 (geometric transform)

P3 core only @ 250nm = ~76 mm2

Apologies if this is messy and badly formatted. Im currently at a wedding, sat waiting between the ceremony and the after party and Ive quite a few beers. I responded because its something I looked at previously with RISC-V cores and I already had the answers in my head

▲cbolton a day ago | parent | next [-]

This scaling computation is too naive and gives the wrong conclusion. If you look at the number of transistors it's about 4.3 million for the BL808 vs 9.5 million for the Katmai core. Counting the logic transistors looks even worse for the Pentium: 2.5M for the BL808 vs 7.5M for the Katmai.

So the Pentium 3 is 2x the transistor count of the C906 (even 3x if you ignore SRAM) and that's despite being 32-bit while the C906 is 64-bit and has a much more capable vector unit.

(As for new vs 30 year old design I don't really have an intuition how that's supposed to factor in the comparison... But if we consider that we should also consider how much engineering effort went into each of these cores, and we're probably talking a dozen engineers for a couple years for the C906 vs hundreds of engineers and more years for the Pentium.)

▲winrid a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Haha thanks. I played games and browsed the web on a 450mhz P3 system as my daily box running Linux for a while.

▲popol12 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Interesting, thanks! Would be cool to have the same comparison for a modern Intel cpu