I'm wondering if any of you have experience doing floating point DSP processing on a moderately recent ARM processor, such as the Cortex-A8 or Cortex-A9? I keep hearing about how powerful ARM processors have become in recent years, and that they have an exceptionally high price to performance ratio. For DSP type processing I don't see a whole lot of information out there, but I've found some floating point benchmarks and the results seem to extremely poor. Using the Linpack benchmark this paper shows 23 MFLOPS for a 600MHz A8 processor, versus almost a GFLOP for a 1.6GHz Intel Atom!
http://www.slideshare.net/napoleaninlondon/arm-cortex-a8-vs-intel-atomarchitectural-and-benchmark-comparisons Apparently the Cortex-A8 floating point processing is not even pipelined, so it's no wonder that FPU performance is dreadful! I also don't know if this benchmark is using the NEON SIMD instructions, but even doubling or quadrupling this figure is still very poor. The A9 processor has a pipelined FPU, so potentially that could make a huge difference. The latest generation Cortex-A15 processor has dual SIMD floating point execution units, which sounds good on paper, but I haven't found any real world data on that. Thoughts? Thanks, Chris -- dupswapdrop -- the music-dsp mailing list and website: subscription info, FAQ, source code archive, list archive, book reviews, dsp links http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/music-dsp http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/music-dsp
