Something here doesn't make sense.

First you say that the Xeon actually is 26% faster. Then you go on to say they used maximum power consumption (TDP) on the intel chip and compared it to actual power consumption on the ARM SoC.

So over 1 million requests. How could this chip be consuming 103 watts ? That's at TDP. It would be far fetched to believe the Intel chip to be running at 100% the whole time. You can't compare actual values on one, against max on the other.

Furthermore, the Intel chip is running at 3 times the clock speed and features more advanced execution units. I'd like to know how quad-core ARM SoC was able to supposedly match the performance of the Quad-core Intel chip. The time to process 1 million requests is 182 seconds on the ARM vs 144 seconds on Intel. Seems a little weak for Intel.

According to wiki. The DMIPS on a Cortex A9 Quad Core at 2.5 Ghz (this is a A9 at 1.1 GHZ, so substantially faster) is 15 DMIPS. The Xeon would be around 38 DMIPS(2600K 3.4 ghz vs 3.3 ghz). Per core that works out to 3.5 vs 9.43. So this SoC should be 1/3 the performance, if you removed the bottlenecks.

How could this thing possibly match the Intel chip in performance ? I would imagine the bottle necks held back the Intel CPU somehow. But even then, it wouldn't be running at MAX TDP the whole time. I would imagine that on a virtualized server their would be plenty to keep the Intel chip busy, even with the botttlenecks. Whereas this SoC would only be good for lightly used servers.

This almost seems like best case scenario for ARM vs absolute worse case scenario for Intel. Good marketing.

The biggest thing that was awful about this article is X-bit's own analyzing. You guys can do better than that, especially with the trouble you guys went through in creating a PCIe passthrough slot to measure power at the motherboard.


At max load, perhaps. Not necessarily when processing those requests. Intel's power management is among the best in the industry.

power management is it the most critical objective for most IT departments? most i´ve seen are services and deliveries of information and applications as needed by the company´s employees. when the numbers of systems approaching hundreds of servers in the data center than it´s time to look for raised-floor data center and air conditioner to cool down the servers. that´s when power management comes into the picture.

at the point when power management comes into the picture does not mean services and deliveries are eliminated.

what is the components that the IT could function to offer the services and delivery the information as needed is more critical.

Guy stop racking your brains, Intel Haswell will take care of everything. Haswell based server chips will be super energy efficient!

This test is just seriously stupid. Who compares exact measurements with maximum average numbers? The answer is: Calxeda's marketing.

Intel could easily answer with a web-benchmark using secure http / https. The ARM cores would loose big times (more than 15x), because they do not have on-chip cryptography.

My conclusion from this unnecessary marketing press release: Caldexa's product must be very bad, if they have to rely on this kind of biased testing.

Nobody needs apples to oranges comparisons.

look at the numbers: the xeon is saturating the 1Gb link, so the test is basically uninformative. it is slightly interesting that the arm can't quite saturate the link - interesting because the load is the dumbest possible unrealistic one: 16K static content. even a comparison using memcached would be more interesting, since such a workload would involve modest index/lookup work, as well as requests distributed over a larger-than-16k dataset...

in short: data does not support conclusions.