ARMv7 vs. x86-64: Pathfinding benchmark of C++, D, Go, Nim, Ocaml, and more

Re:ARMv7 vs. x86-64: Pathfinding benchmark of C++, D, Go, Ni... by rwmj on Saturday December 20, 2014 @06:20AM (#8776379)

Which version of OCaml? The ARMv7 backend was rewritten about 2 years ago, and merged in 4.00.

http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=5433

The new backend is supposed to be considerably faster on floating point code. This code looks integer only, and I don't have relative performance of old/new backend for integer code.

As a wider question: Who cares much about ARMv7? ARMv8 is a completely different beast, requiring a different backend, with much better raw performance (on the same terms as x86-64). That's where languages should be concentrating their current efforts.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:ARMv7 vs. x86-64: Pathfinding benchmark of C++, D, Go, Ni... by kryps on Saturday December 20, 2014 @07:07AM (#8776444)

Everyone cares about armv7 because it is the CPU architecture deployed in over 95% of the mobile devices.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:ARMv7 vs. x86-64: Pathfinding benchmark of C++, D, Go, Ni... by logicchains on Saturday December 20, 2014 @07:03AM (#8776438)

OCaml version 4.02.0. I don't have an ARMv8 device to benchmark on, unfortunately.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:ARMv7 vs. x86-64: Pathfinding benchmark of C++, D, Go, Ni... by jensnockert on Saturday December 20, 2014 @06:35AM (#8776402)

Except it's really hard to benchmark on ARMv8 since non-Apple hardware is expensive.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:ARMv7 vs. x86-64: Pathfinding benchmark of C++, D, Go, Ni... by rwmj on Saturday December 20, 2014 @07:11AM (#8776451)

Big companies have plenty of access. I work for Red Hat and have one right next to my desk. I also know SUSE and MSFT have the hardware, and I'm sure many more.

I've been working on fixing bugs in the ARMv8 backend in the OCaml compiler - it's now stable, and performs very well (I can't go into exact performance details for contract reasons).

http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=6489

http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=6284

http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=6283

(and more ...)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:ARMv7 vs. x86-64: Pathfinding benchmark of C++, D, Go, Ni... by lazyjones on Saturday December 20, 2014 @07:54AM (#8776522)

> hard to benchmark on ARMv8 since non-Apple hardware is expensive.

If Android will do - Cortex-A53 smartphones like the Huawei Ascend Y550 cost 120€ nowdays in Europe (about 4x the price of a Raspberry Pi).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:ARMv7 vs. x86-64: Pathfinding benchmark of C++, D, Go, Ni... by rwmj on Saturday December 20, 2014 @11:23AM (#8776997)

Also Nexus 9, for quite a bit more money. The problem with these phones and tablets is they are quite unlike server hardware:

- Far too little memory (2GB vs 16/32GB+)

- Slow flash vs SATA disks

- The "zoo" of u-boot/proprietary kernel crap, instead of UEFI, ACPI and standard upstream kernels

- Nonsense like locked bootloaders (Nexus 9 disables HYP mode in the bootloader!!!)

[ Parent | on HN ]