At an ARM event in Taipei this week I was fortunate enough to have a few minutes with a Tegra 2-based tablet prototype known as ‘Harmony.’ It’s a fairly standard tablet with a capacitive touchscreen and weighing in at the 700gm iPad-weight. You’ll see more details in the video below.
The interesting thing was the SunSpider javascript benchmark I did. As you might know, SunSpider is a well-recognized test of a browser’s ability to run javascript and it serves as a good data point for working out how fast a processor is. As far as I know, most, if not all, the javascript processing is done by the CPU.
You’ll see a result of 9.8 seconds on the video which is about the same as you’d see on the iPad. The iPad uses what we believe is an ARM A8 core, or at least something very similar. However, that doesn’t mean that dual-core Tegra 2 is only as powerful as a single-core A4 CPU because the two browsers are vastly different. The javascript engine on the iPad is super-fast where the engine used on the Android 2.1 browser isn’t.
- Android 2.1 on Tegra 2 9 seconds (Tegra prototype shown in video)
- Android 2.2 on Snapdragon 1Ghz 6 seconds. (Nexus One, Google V8 engine)
- Android 1.6 on Snapdragon 1Ghz 24 seconds (Xperia X10)
- Android 1.6 on Snapdragon 1Ghz – 54 seconds (Dell Streak prototype)
- Chrome on Atom 1.6 2 seconds (average netbook, Google V8 engine)
As you can see there, the Android browser is at least 4 times less efficient in processing javascript on version 1.6 than it is on 2.2. I suspect that version 2.1 is close to 1.6 in its efficiency too which means that the Tegra 2 is over 200% faster than Snapdragon. Given that it has two cores, it’s not surprising. A single A9 core (in my estimate) brings about 20% more raw CPU performance over A8 so the figures look correct.
Add in the 4X improvement that you’ll see with Froyo’s Google V8 processing engine and there you go! Tegra2 with Froyo will be able to process javascript as well as a 1.6Ghz netbook. Just imagine what the 1.2Ghz dual-core Snapdragon will do!
More information about high-end ARM platforms in our primer, here.
We’ve already seen that ARM can beat Atom in certain low-end Atom scenarios and cross referencing to some other figures I have seem to confirm that ARM is going to challenge Atom in raw CPU. If only they could sort the operating system out and get some productivity apps going, we’d have some interesting smartbooks out there.
Chippy Sidenote: 2 cores needs 2x power! It would be interesting to work out the CPU drain figures under these javascript test conditions. Also note that system performance is not directly related to CPU performance. A lot of work has to go into a lot of other hardware and a lot of other software to get a system running ‘fast.’ Please remember that when Intel and ARM enter the clock-speed game over the next few years!
New article: Tegra 2 Javascript Benchmark Shows a Lot of Promise. http://bit.ly/b4zfQe
RT @umpcportal: Tegra 2 Javascript Benchmark Shows a Lot of Promise. http://bit.ly/b4zfQe
Tegra 2 Javascript Benchmark Shows a Lot of Promise. http://bit.ly/b4zfQe
Tegra 2 Javascript Benchmark Shows a Lot of Promise. http://j.mp/cXgpVq
RT @mdh47: Tegra 2 Javascript Benchmark Shows a Lot of Promise. http://j.mp/cXgpVq
“. If only they could sort the operating system out and get some productivity apps going, we’d have some interesting smartbooks out there.”
whishful thinking …. as long as android (and other like os’es) keep being consumer market-oriented only (means phone calls, music, video and social networks), this will not be the case. in my opinion one of the major reasons why smartbooks to the day never showed up in stores.
i would not be so sure:
http://product.thinkfree.com/mobile/android
But with a full Linux distribution I can choose Abiword/Gnumeric, KOffice or OpenOffice. All these great productivity tools are available for free. You don’t have any comparable option on Android.
I wonder if the javascript performance in android 2.2 makes google docs a viable option for productivity, at least on smartbooks. If tegra 2 performs roughly similar to atom then google docs should be fine since I use it all the time from my netbook in chrome.
I’m expecting little over 2x improvement on the 2.1 to 2.2 version of Android: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/reviews/mobile-os/2010/05/28/android-22-froyo-and-flash-player-101-for-android-40089072/
Javascript Sunspider results:
Core i5 661(3.33GHz)/X25-M SSD Win 7 64-bit:
IE8: ~4500ms
Safari 4: ~630ms
Firefox: ~830ms
Viliv S5 Atom 1.33GHz HT WinXP 32-bit
A/C Safari 4: ~2990ms
Battery: ~3050ms
Core i5 661 is 4.76x faster than Atom with 2.5x advantage in clock speed. Turbo Mode didn’t kick in as it wasn’t even taking up 50% CPU usage on any threads, and 2 were idle with total of 4 threads as the Core i5 has HT.
The way it behaved on Task Manager made me conclude that its not multi-threaded. Windows commonly jumps threads around.
The results for Core i7 965EE running at 3.20GHz with a superior memory subsystem gets 840ms.
From the results on my post above, I’m expecting ~4000ms on a 1GHz Cortex A9. That is a 30-50% improvement over Cortex A9 and is expected gains for OoO + improved cache.
Tegra 2 couldn’t come sooner. In addition the 200% edge over Snapdragon, I bet there’s a significant battery use reduction with Tegra 2 powered Smartphones.
Tegra 2 Javascript Benchmark Shows a Lot of Promise.: At an ARM event in Taipei this week I was fortunate enough t… http://bit.ly/9ERL8K
“Chippy Sidenote: 2 cores needs 2x power!”
While that may be technically true it doesn’t tell the whole story. Multicore CPUs use less total power to compete tasks, especially on ARM that can shut itself down at idle so effectively. Intel, AMD, IBM, Sun, ARM and many others are all turning to multicore to improve performance while keeping power usage as low as possible.
For single threaded tasks all but one of the cores is shut down and you use n energy. For multithreaded tasks you use m cores times n energy. But the task takes 1/m times as long to complete so you still only use n energy but it took a lot less time to finish. Now that’s under ideal, perfect scaling software but in general multicore is incredibly high performance for the power cost.
As someone has already noted, sunspider is not a multithreaded task so it is only running on one of the A9 cores. The new HTML5 WebWorkers API allows for the development of multithreaded javascript on websites but without that all web javascript is single threaded. IE9 will include the ability to compile and execute javascript on different cores but such a scheme seems non-optimal for mobile since it requires a lot of intercore communication and mobile parts don’t have a lot of bandwidth.
When anandtech tested the ipad against several devices on sunspider they got the following results:
atom n450 3.4 s
ipad 10.4 s
nexus one 2.1 14.4 s
iphone 3GS 17.3 s
Since nexus one is now running sunspider in a little under 6 seconds in 2.2 that’s a 2.4x decrease. If the scaling holds for A9 then we can expect tegra 2 to run sunspider in about 3.8 seconds. It almost certainly won’t be perfect so I’d imagine somewhere around 4 to 4.5 seconds.
Since snapdragon is taking 5.9 seconds this doesn’t seem like a huge improvement. But qualcomm designed snapdragon to beat A8, which it does handily. Droid with an OMAP3 A8 cpu runs sunspider on android 2.1 in 34.3 seconds. That’s more than double N1’s 15. On Froyo that means droid would take about 14 seconds. A9 has a 60% clock rate advantage on A8 so a 1 GHz A8 would take about 9 seconds on android 2.2. These are all very rough numbers until some real hardware is available but it seems to me A9 has a lot more than a 20% increase per core over A8. The other interesting thing is ipad actually does have a 1 GHz A8 cpu and takes 10 seconds. Of course it’s entirely possible I screwed up the math and have just been making things up.
From News/Blogs: Tegra 2 Javascript Benchmark Shows a Lot of Promise. | UMPCPortal …: (Nexus One, Google… http://bit.ly/cwgIxz #android
As much as I like ARM power efficiency and Linux openess and free applications, should I use my own money to buy a smartbook, today I would personally still go for a Windows one. The advantage in price and battery life coming from ARM is still too small compared to the ability of running any Windows app. Give ARM the ability to run Window. THAT will buy me.
For kicks decided to see what the ClarionMind would get with sunspider.
It’s an 800mhz intel atom z500.
I got 8729.6ms.
Not too bad considering it was throttled down to 600mhz the entire time.
It was running the stock Midinux os.
Tegra 2 will bring 200% speed improvement in Javascript over Snapdragon, and same Javascript speed as an Atom netbook: http://bit.ly/bDDxKZ