Performance Comparison of a few Computer Systems

Small computer modules like the Tinker Board now easily outperform old laptops while the cost ratio is 1:20.

Why is that Tinker Board runs so much faster?  Compaq Presario 2100 laptop (2003) has an Intel Celeron processor, from the Wikipedia,

Model Number	sSpec Number	Frequency	L2 Cache	FSB	Mult	Voltage	TDP	Socket	Release Date	Part Number(s)
Mobile Celeron 2.0	SL6QH (C1) SL6VJ (D1)	2000 MHz	256 KB	400 MT/s	20×	1.3 V	32 W	PPGA 478	14 January 2003	RH80532NC041256

It has 1GB RAM (max possible).  The graphic processor is ATI Radeon.  The Tinker Board has 2GB dual channel LPDDR3 RAM and a Rockchip RK3288 processor (Quad-core ARM Cortex-A17, up to 1.8 GHz and Quad-core ARM Mali-T760 MP4 GPU clocked at 600 MHz, 1MB L2 unified cache ).  The board runs on less than 5W.  Note that while everything else has improved, the processor speed has not.

The Tinker Board also compares favorably against other similar boards.  It is reported that the Tinker Board is almost twice the performance as Raspberry Pi 3.  When compiling KiCad, the Tinker Board takes about 4 hours, vs 8 hours on OrangePi Prime.  This seems consistent with some benchmarks that OPiP has a little lower performance than RPi 3.  Perhaps this justifies the twice of the cost.  Furthermore, the board quality is better.  However, while OrangePi releases the full schematics, Asus only releases the partial schematics for the Tinker Board.  Comparing RK3288 vs H5, CPU speed 1.8GHz vs 1.37GHz, about 30% faster.  So that alone does not account for the difference.  RK3288 is 32-bit architecture ARMv7-A and H5 is 64-bit ARMv8-A  (Cortex-A53 Quad-Core, 512KB L2, Mali450 MP4 GPU).  Cortex-A17 features out-of-order execution and deeper pipeline than Cortex-A53.

On Core2 Duo T7200, compiling KiCad takes about 2.5 hours with a solid state drive with 3Gb/s SATA connection.

Model number	sSpec number	Cores	Frequency	L2 cache	FSB	Mult.	Voltage	TDP	Socket	Release date	Part number(s)
Core 2 Duo T7200	SL9SF (B2)	2	2 GHz	4 MiB	667 MT/s	12×	0.95–1.175 V	34 W	Socket M	August 2006	LF80537GF0414M

All these have been single core performance. If we use all available cores, Core2 Duo still outperforms the Tinker Board, but the difference is smaller, about 30%.  Multicore improves 2.2 times for the Tinker Board and 1.6 times for Core2 Duo.  On Atomic Pi,

Model number

sSpec number

Cores

Frequency

Burst

L2 cache

GPU model

GPU frequency

Memory

TDP

SDP

Socket

Release date

Part number(s)

Atom x5-Z8350

SR2KT (D1)

4

1.44 GHz

1.92 GHz

2 MiB

HD Graphics (12 EUs)

200-500 MHz

1 × DDR3L-1600

2.17 W

2 W

UTFCBGA592

February 2016

FJ8066401836620

running 4 cores (2M L2) at 1.68GHz, the compilation takes 2.3 hours, longer than the Tinker Board, which is a little surprising.  Core2 Duo T7200 and Atom x5-Z8350 receive similar CPU Mark, but single-thread rating is much lower for x5-Z8350.The system has the advantage of having a faster disk.  A further comparison, compiling KiCad on i9-8950HK (2.9GHz/4.8GHz turbo 12MB L3) Linux Virtualbox takes only about 45 minutes.