Cheers, that's interesting!This is where the Cortex presentation pulled the Dhrystone 2.1 figures from:
http://homepage.virgin.net/roy.longbottom/dhrystone results.htm
And why not? Remember those scores are for a SINGLE core in the Core 2 Duo case and FOUR cores in the Cortex-A9 case. Also remembe that the Cortex would benefit from having what's basically an Integrated Memory Controller and much lower relative clock speeds, so memory latency is less of a problem. This also makes more advanced forms of OoOE less necessary IMO...I would take the benchmarks with grain of salt, unless some are willing to believe the 4 A9 cores will be faster than the Core 2 Duo.
Now, I do think that Dhrystone likely isn't incredibly representative of real-world performance, but if the question is whether a 4x1GHz Cortex-A9 should beat a 1x2.4GHz Conroe, my answer would be that it should. Remember that ILP extraction is a game of diminishing returns, especially in terms of integers, and that the x86 ISA certainly doesn't make things any easier for Intel...
Once again that's very interesting, thanks. Hmm, let's scale the Z510 result to 1GHz, so it becomes 6.2 - now, if the A8 has a Dhrystone score of 2/MHz and the A9 has a score of 2.3/MHz, that would give us a performance result of... 6.2 again! So the ILP between Silverthorne (without IMC) and the Cortex A9 (with IMC) seems comparable.Here's Intel's numbers for Silverthorne against A8:
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2008/0402/kaigai432.htm
EEMBC Suite v1.1(compared to ARM 11 400MHz)
Cortex A8 600MHz: 3.3x
Cortex A8 1GHz: 5.4x
Intel Atom Z510 1.1GHz: 6.8x
Intel Atom Z530 1.6GHz/w HT: 13x
I would actually expect the A9 to have a 10-20% ILP advantage, so that's slightly more positive for Intel than I thought. Of course I wouldn't be surprised if, in real-world scenarios, the A9 was more than 15% faster than the A8... Once again though, perf/watt for Intel's core will be massively lower than that of A9 cores on 40nm SoCs.
I will refrain myself from judging the SGX IP based on that number since it's on 130nm and yet still quite small, so it wouldn't exactly be fair...You know how IGP in Poulsbo performs?? It also says there: "Intel told us to expect a 3DMark '05 score around the 150 point mark."
EDIT: According to my calculations based on public pictures, Poulsbo is 146mm² and the '3D' part of it is 42.5mm² (once again, on 130nm).
EDIT2: Oh and this also isn't very impressive: http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2008/0402/kaigai01_10.gif