Linus Torvalds (torvalds.delete@this.linux-foundation.org) on April 9, 2014 1:44 pm wrote:
> Linus Torvalds (torvalds.delete@this.linux-foundation.org) on April 2, 2014 2:25 pm wrote:
> >
> > On the CPU side, I'd like to see benchmarks comparing the two. Jaguar probably wins, but
> > not likely by a huge amount - they are both dual-issue OoO, and judging by past efforts I
> > suspect Atom has a faster L2 cache to somewhat make up for smaller instruction queues.
>
> So AnandTech has a Jaguar review up with benchmark data. It has a comparison between a quad-core
> Jaguar (at 25W) against a dual-core Silvermont (at 10W), and they come in pretty much head-to-head
> in single-thread benchmarks. Jaguar wins some, Silvermont wins others.
>
> Looks like core-for-core, they're pretty much comparable. And the GPU in the Jaguar
> SoC is better. So no huge surprises. AMD is competing on price and GPU, while Intel
> can obviously to some degree coast on brand recognition, and owns the high end.

I suspect a large part of this is because Jaguar doesn't have any turbo capabilities and the SoC memory controller and fabric is probably more primitive.

I expect that in a competently designed SoC, Jaguar should beat out Silvermont-based designs. Especially in FP. It's strange to see results otherwise.

David