First ARM Benchmarks – The Race Is On

by Richard Fichera, Forrester

This week, sandwiched between the annual Structure Big Data conference and the International Supercomputing show in Hamburg, Germany, ARM startup and HP partner Calxeda also found time to release the first well-documented x86 versus ARM benchmarks. The results, shown below, are very positive — while there are some caveats that we need to note, the first generation ARM SOCs seem to deliver on their basic promise of much better performance per Watt.

The benchmark, which compares anew ARM SOC from Calxeda to a Sandy Bridge (not Ivy Bridge) low-end Xeon server with the same number of cores, shows that the Xeon CPU, while delivering more performance, has a very large deficit in workload per Watt, which is one of the key value propositions of the ARM community. Benchmark details*:

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