Pine 64 benchmarks

[ssvb]

The most important thing to understand when it's about benchmarking is:

1) hardware settings (if you're interested in performance you have to take into account that you need to improve heat dissipation otherwise throttling will occur -- ignoring these basics just produces numbers without meaning as it is done on Phoronix/openbenchmarking.org all the times)

2) software settings (if you're interested in performance you want to use optimised software that makes use of the hardware)

The Phoronix Test suite ignores both and you end up with results like this: http://openbenchmarking.org/result/16030...603082GA36

If you compare the last 5 results you get an idea what's wrong with benchmarking the Phoronix style. For example the 'Smallpt v1.0' benchmark: The Phoronix founder lists the Pine64+ with a score of 1500 (using no heatsink, longsleep's WiP dvfs and cooling state table settings from a few days ago and especially NO optimised software). When I ran the last test, I used '-O3' (optimises the code to use NEON and so on) and heatsink/fan. My result is 215 and that's ~7 times faster than what Phoronix will publish as the Pine64's speed in this area.

That's important to understand. Michael Larabel's published score for the Pine64 is 7 times lower in a specific benchmark since he refrains from doing it right. The most important difference is -O2 vs. -O3. The whole http://openbenchmarking.org site is just a huge collection of meaningless numbers since the differences listed there are mostly influenced by compiler versions/settings and thermal conditions but he still encourages his users to misinterpret them as 'hardware benchmarks'.

Well, all of these flaws have been known and reported ages ago: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/sof...post320735
But as long as the Phoronix readers are happy with these tests, nothing is going to improve. There is simply no incentive to do a better job.