I've done a bit of audio DSP on the Beagleboard. It worked fine - we
were doing a reasonably complete realtime MIDI synth emulation with
filters, oscillators, lfos, etc running as a foreground application
under Angstrom Linux and it wasn't breaking a sweat.
The paper you referenced gave the compilation methodology for the
benchmarks and it appears that they were using CodeSourcery GCC. The
compiler was from 2009 - 3 years ago and IIRC that version did not apply
NEON SIMD to any compiled code. As well, the code generation wasn't
nearly as good as that available in the current versions of GCC. It may
well be that if these benchmarks were run again today you'd get
significantly different results. Also, the Beagleboard OMAP3530
processor is a bit long in the tooth compared to the dual-core A9
processors available on Pandaboard today.
Eric
On 09/24/2012 05:54 PM, Chris Townsend wrote:
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?
--
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
