Interesting, thanks!
Would be cool to have the same comparison for a modern Intel cpu
Haha thanks. I played games and browsed the web on a 450mhz P3 system as my daily box running Linux for a while.
This scaling computation is too naive and gives the wrong conclusion. If you look at the number of transistors it's about 4.3 million for the BL808 vs 9.5 million for the Katmai core. Counting the logic transistors looks even worse for the Pentium: 2.5M for the BL808 vs 7.5M for the Katmai.
So the Pentium 3 is 2x the transistor count of the C906 (even 3x if you ignore SRAM) and that's despite being 32-bit while the C906 is 64-bit and has a much more capable vector unit.
Its an interesting comparison that Im not sure reflects positively on the RISC-V C906 core when you factor in core area and process nodes and core area, 22nm vs 250nm. Even if we choose the worst case scenario for the P3 cores to compare which would be the Katmai core. We are basically look at ~parity with a 30 year old core design
C906 core only @ 22nm = ~0.6 mm2 C906 core only @ 250nm = ~78 mm2 (geometric transform)
P3 core only @ 22nm = ~0.5 mm2 (geometric transform) P3 core only @ 250nm = ~76 mm2
Apologies if this is messy and badly formatted. Im currently at a wedding, sat waiting between the ceremony and the after party and Ive quite a few beers. I responded because its something I looked at previously with RISC-V cores and I already had the answers in my head