How much processing power does the GBA really have?

[Johnny_Physics]

The ARM ISA is very a clever one indeed, so it's no use to go by clock speed and say it's 386:ish. That said, the GBA hasn't much to put up against even those 10-15 year old stationary machines -- I believe the CPU delivers around 15 MIPS and there's no float unit.

1.1 MIPS per mhz to be more exact, so it clocks in at roughly 28 MIPS when running at 16.7mhz.
There's no float unit in it either, and it doesn't support exotic things such as 'division' in hardware.

 

[Guden Oden]

Not sure about Chess computations, but in terms of graphics I would put it about on par with 3do

Hm, didn't 3DO have a hardware rasterizer? It could do some rather nice transparencies n stuff for the time, that I do remember.

 

[thop]

1.1 MIPS per mhz to be more exact, so it clocks in at roughly 28 MIPS when running at 16.7mhz.

P60 sports ~100 MIPS. 486 DX33 about ~25. A bit slower than i thought but not too bad.

 

[Guden Oden]

MIPS aren't a very good performance comparison tho. I would think a x86 MIP would be more powerful than an ARM MIP, especially considering x86 has a complete instruction set, etc. Probably faster bus/memory, etc.

 

[Tahir2]

http://www.bdti.com/products/reports_arm.html
http://www.bdti.com/articles/benchmk_2000.pdf
http://computing-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/ARM7
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Gameboy Advance

CPI [Cycles per instruction] of ~1.9 on an ARM7, and ~1.5 on an ARM9
http://brew.qualcomm.com/brew_bnry/pdf/events/brew_2003/M6100andBeyond-2003.pdf

I learnt something new, the Dreamcast used ARM7 processors for its sound processing running at 45MHz and about 40 MIPS.

One page I saw described MIPS as "Meaningless Information for Processor Speed" 8)

After all this the conclusion is: the GBA processor is a toy processor for a toy product (j/k).

 

[thop]

I just let my ~3000+ XP running Shredder7 play against the GBA, and to make it a tiny bit fair the XP got 1 minute, and the GBA 30 minutes. The GBA playing white lost after the 39th move, with 7 minutes on the clock while the XP still had 29 seconds.

I rest my case (mostly because of what Tahir posted)