Millicomputer Performance Benchmarks

Performance benchmarks for several Millicomputer CPUs are being measured by several Homebrew Mobile Club members at our wiki.

The benchmark used is an old simple CPU benchmark called nbench, which is basically the original Byte magazine benchmark collection from ten years ago. Its very easy to get running. I looked at the industry standard SPEC benchmarks, but they are more vendor oriented and are not freely available. They don't have any useful results posted for ARM architecture systems.

At this point the results are hard to compare since the compiler options in use are somewhat varied and results for recent enterprise server CPUs have not been posted.

What is a Millicomputer? Why talk about Millicomputing?

While researching devices for my home brew mobile phone, I've realized that the current generation of CPUs for mobile devices are actually seriously powerful, very low cost and use almost no power. The performance per watt and per dollar seems to be an order of magnitude better than the PC-class CPUs that are common in commodity servers nowadays. The absolute performance and memory capacity is lower, but is comparable to common PC hardware from a few years ago, and could be useful for more than running a high end phone or portable games machine. Devices such as the Marvel PXA270 and Freescale i.MX31 run at over 500MHz, some include floating point units, they support at least 128MB of RAM (a single chip), and a myriad of I/O interfaces, with Linux 2.6 support.

While the current mainstream CPUs were driven by the development of the home PC market, this generation is driven by the development of the mobile, battery powered device market, which is a very large. For example the worldwide cellphone market is something like a billion devices a year.

I think that there could be some interesting general purpose computer systems built from low power devices (CPUs that use less than one watt). I looked around but wasn't sure what to search for... I do know about the systems that are sold for embedded use, but they are typically configured using lower speed and lower memory options.

Does anyone know of vendors selling general purpose millicomputer based systems?

I need a name for this class of system, so I'm going to call them Millicomputers, and I'm going to explore this area in public on this blog, and using the principles of open hardware that we have adopted for the homebrew mobile phone club, I expect to help build some.

I originally asked this question on my main blog, and asked a lot of people in person, but didn't find a pre-existing name or any objections to this concept.