Energy Efficiency of ARM Architecture for Cloud Computing Applications

Following “Pandaboard Cloud Cluster Running Google App Engine” post, there were some questions regarding the actual power efficiency of ARM servers vs Intel (Xeon) servers and some commenters questioned the performance of ARM chips. I’ve found a thesis evaluating how the energy efficiency of the ARMv7 architecture based processors Cortex-A9 and Cortex-A8 compares – in applications such as a SIP Proxy and a web server (Apache2) – to Intel Xeon processors. The focus of this thesis is to compare the energy efficiency between the two architectures rather than pure performance where the Xeon largely outperforms ARM processors, although a cluster of ARM servers could be used instead to reach the same processing power. Depending on the application, benchmarks indicate energy efficiency of 3-11 times greater for the ARM Cortex-A9 in comparison to the Intel Xeon. The full thesis (74 pages) is available below. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in […]

Freescale i.MX6 Quad-Core Benchmark Demo

Freescale is showcasing the performance of their Quad Core ARM Cortex-A9 i.MX6 Quad processor at ARM Techcon 2011. The Freescale i.MX6 reference design runs a demo in Android 3.x (Honeycomb) with four windows: JPEG Decoding Window Web browser rendering and scrolling HTML5 Fish tank CPU Usage real-time chart The 3 windows used for the benchmark are all using software processing (no GPU involved) to show to performance improvement by moving from 1 to 2 and finally 4 cores. The benchmark results are quite impressive as with one core JPEG decoding is about 0.6 frame per second and with 4 cores it can decode 4.2 frames per seconds while other windows also show performance improvement.  Freescale says there was little modifications done to make the software work on four core and you don’t even need to have multi-threaded applications to take advantage of 4 cores as the OS will usually take […]

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