[Lazarus] FPC and Lazarus on ARM

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Henry Vermaak wrote:
> On 25 March 2011 18:33, Marco van de Voort <marcov at stack.nl> wrote:
>> On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 03:34:07PM +0000, Henry Vermaak wrote:
>>> The Cortex A8 (armv7) is 2 generations newer than the Kirkwood processor
>>> on open-rd (armv5).  It's got almost twice the DMIPS/MHz.  I'd be very
>>> surprised if it's slower.
>> Interesting, do you have an URL to those benchmarks?
> 
> Google can get you quite far.  ARM9 is usually quoted to have 1.1 DMIPS/MHz:
> 
> http://hubpages.com/hub/The-ARM-family
> 
> Wikipedia says that Cortex A8 is "up to 2 DMIPS/Mhz".  Of course, if
> you have a floating point intensive app, you can get much bigger
> gains.

Everybody knows that benchmarks are odious, but I've got a handy 
"torture test" that I've run on a variety of systems from a 16-way Sun 
down to a "Slug". Usefully, this can be used both to get a time to 
completion of the standard job and a Watt-minutes figure, both of which 
are significant when choosing systems:

SPARCserver 1000E, 8 jobs, 550W (560VA)           1m51.926s    1,018

E4500 8x SMP 400MHz 4Gb 16 jobs, 772W (845VA)     0m31.025s      399

Compaq ProLiant ML530 G2, 2.8GHz, 3Gb, 8 jobs, 390W 0m12.170      79

Linksys NSLU2, 266MHz 32Mb, 1 job, 7W             6m35.014s       46

It doesn't exercise network functions, but my experience is that these 
are comparatively cheap compared with compression etc. that it does.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]