Geekbench is SH*T.
It actually seems to have gotten worse with version 3, which you should be aware of. On ARM64, that SHA1 performance is hardware-assisted. I don't know if SHA2 is too, but Aarch64 does apparently do SHA256 in the crypto unit, so it might be fully or partially so.
And on both ARM and x86, the AES numbers are similarly just about the crypto unit.
So basically a quarter to a third of the "integer" workloads are just utter BS. They are not comparable across architectures due to the crypto units, and even within one architecture the numbers just don't mean much of anything.
And quite frankly, it's not even just the crypto ones. Looking at the other GB3 "benchmarks", they are mainly small kernels: not really much different from dhrystone. I suspect most of them have a code footprint that basically fits in a L1I cache.
Linus
For Linus anything that warrants any kind of criticism is worthless garbage. His hyperbole is way over the top, great example of a really smart person who says some really stupid things. My favorite was his quip about how no one sane uses NEON because it's not on Tegra 2 (he made this WEEKS ago, mind you)
I'll give my thoughts about Linus remarks:Do you disagree with his characterization of GB3? You are a software expert, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
Do you disagree with his characterization of GB3? You are a software expert, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
But when talking on something like this he quickly goes into this mode where he calls the other person a blithering idiot and doesn't listen to a word they have to say, then starts hand waving around a lot and only gradually backs down a little (or at least he did that with me).
So what some of us assumed all along is true. The Apple hype is...hype.
Ugh, why exactly? Not that I'm an Apple drone, but why the h8?
In this forum it seems that many people also fall to Intel hypeWhy the assumption of hate if you dont fall for the hype? That seems to be a common stereotyping these days:\
Every processor is a bundle of thousands of shortcuts for commonly used math functions. Should we disable the hardware square root function to keep things level? Barrel shifter? Out-of-order execution? Cherry picking optimizations is a way to make things biased real quick.
If you want to compare a specific benchmark, look at that one.
Why the assumption of hate if you dont fall for the hype? That seems to be a common stereotyping these days:\
On both Haswell and ARMv8 chips these are not really crypto units, but dedicated instructions that do part of the work. That's different from what VIA or TI do; they have dedicated copros for that.I can see where Mr. Torvalds is coming from - the benchmark isn't a pure test of CPU performance because they are offloading it to a dedicated unit - but I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing except that amount weighting given to the crypto results. If you want to do crypto operations, you'd use a dedicated crypto unit if it was available and you'd want to know the performance of that operation on that dedicated unit... if other SOC's suffer because they don't have a dedicated crypto unit, then they will justifiably suffer in their scores. Crypto performance is a pretty big deal nowadays. But when the benchmark is so heavily skewed towards crypto ops - 1/3 of the score just comes from one dedicated hardware unit, it does start to swamp out other differences.
There are no more people slamming others on RWT than what you find here. Avoid "someone" (Paul de Mone), Alberto (an Intel fanboy who seems to have lost his brain somewhere, assuming he ever had one), Wilco (an ARM fanboy but at least with a brain) and Linus when he is in a bad day, and discussions are very civil and enlightening.I will say also that I used to post at RealWorldTech but I've always found that site intimidating. Despite the fact that I have almost 20 years as a CPU designer and I've met David Kanter in person (at ISSCC... he may not remember it, but I do), I do feel like I'm playing in the big leagues every time that I post there and someone slamming me with some verbal putdown does tend to ruin my day (I'm a thin-skinned geek). So read, but I don't post.
Yes, I also liked his articles on RWT. But it seems his love for Intel Itanium turned him into an angry and embittered man. He now keeps on bashing people that don't agree with him. Note that he still makes some interesting posts, but he somehow reminds me of people who were great, are no more great, and keep on talking about better times, failing to notice things changed. He recently basically wrote that everything had been done in compiler technology, how can a smart guy say that unless he's blinded by his hate or love for a company?Wow, avoid Paul de Mone? I used think he was a damn smart guy back when posting on comp.arch (1990s) Has he gone nuts or something?
I can see where Mr. Torvalds is coming from - the benchmark isn't a pure test of CPU performance because they are offloading a substantial portion of the crypto operations to a dedicated unit - but I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing except that amount weighting given to the crypto results. If you want to do crypto operations, you'd use a dedicated crypto unit if it was available and you'd want to know the performance of that operation on that dedicated unit... if other SOC's suffer because they don't have a dedicated crypto unit, then they will justifiably suffer in their scores. Crypto performance is a pretty big deal nowadays. But when the benchmark is so heavily skewed towards crypto ops - 1/3 of the score just comes from one dedicated hardware unit, it does start to swamp out other differences. I wouldn't say that GB3 is bad - or even excrement - but it's good to highlight the inherent skew of the results due to the focus on dedicated silicon.
I will say also that I used to post at RealWorldTech but I've always found that site intimidating. Despite the fact that I have almost 20 years as a CPU designer and I've met David Kanter in person (at ISSCC... he may not remember it, but I do), I do feel like I'm playing in the big leagues every time that I post there and someone slamming me with some verbal putdown does tend to ruin my day (I'm a thin-skinned geek). So I read RWT, but I don't post... or at least not in a long long time.
ehhhhhh...........surpriseIn this forum it seems that many people also fall to Intel hype
As an experienced CPU designer, what's your opinion about PASemi's PA6T in 2006? how about pert/Mhz? You know the PA was merged into Apple, so apple now has the ability to challenge intel in CPU design?
There was an article by David Kanter in real world tech.
http://www.realworldtech.com/pa-semi/