BASIC Engine Benchmark Program

Hawk

Thinking about the compatible hardware table in the Wiki, I was wondering whether it is worth developing some sort of benchmarking program thatwould allow the different hardware to be compared. I don't even know if they vary at all. Does the H3 processor define the specs totally, or does the way it's implemented on the SBC influence the overall performance?
Do H2+ processors perform the same as H3?
Do they access the storage devices at different rates?
Just tossing around some ideas.

MC10Guru

Ahoy,
The Allwinner H3 SOC seems to be touchy about supplied voltage levels. Different boards handle the voltage regulation differently. The voltage fed to the SOC usually varies from 1.1v to 1.3v. This amount influences the top clock speed the SOC can reach. Although the H3 can safely use a top speed of 1.2gHz many boards top out at 1008mHz because of low voltage & poor regulation. I've heard of users overclocking to 1.5gHz but the H3 gets flaky because of low voltage levels. I found that the Tauon PC-1 runs somewhat cooler depending on the power supply I use. Moving to a switched regulated 3A supply lowered my CPU temp by 5-8dC. The Armbian forum has some good threads discussing the H3 power regulation and frequency scaling issues (mostly poor).

The quality of the DDR RAM chips can determine the speed of RAM i/o. Poor quality can lead to booting issues and require lower RAM speeds on the inititial boot process. Not a fun process for Linux or Android but not really an issue on Engine BASIC NG AFAIK.

As far as I can tell the H2+ is an H3 with lower GPU specs. But the H3 has never been a 4K GPU beast anyway. Pry off the heat sink on many H3 TV boxes and you'll find an H2+ on the "4K Ultra HD Super TV Box" 😉
daveyb

Hawk

MC10Guru The sort of benchmarking I was thinking of would be purely from a BASIC Engine perspective. I’m not really interested in just benchmarking SBCs in general. But it could cover stuff like RAM access speed, GPU performance, I’d say SD access speed, but that’s probably more dependant on the particular SD card.

painintheworld

Hawk, I have done some testing loading as many ~ .25, .5, and 1MB PNG as possible in x number of seconds. It would be really cool to expand this. I would be glad to work on this project, too!

Hawk

painintheworld Yeah, that 's the sort Of thing I was thinking about...pushing pixels, random access of RAM, sequential access of RAM. Anything that's likely to change by board rather than processor.

uli

The H3 is a refreshingly inflexible chip; that's why EB runs so well on so many different boards. AFAIK the only thing that can affect performance on a board level is the CPU voltage it is fed. And that doesn't directly affect performance either, it just limits the clock speeds at which the CPU can be run.

In my experience, the (or rather, my) OPi's run stably up to about 1100 MHz with the default voltages. Other boards may drive the CPU at different voltages and may therefore be able to sustain higher or lower maximum clock speeds.

The CPU speed can be changed from BASIC using the CPUSPEED command to a percentage of the maximum clock frequency, which I think is currently defined to be 1296 MHz or something like that.

Changing the voltages is possible on the OPi, but that is board-specific and thus not currently supported by Engine BASIC. It might be possible to do so from BASIC, though, if you read enough datasheets...
Some details: https://linux-sunxi.org/Xunlong_Orange_Pi_PC#CPU_clock_speed_limit
(Be aware, however, that experimenting with this and getting it wrong may blow up your H3. So may getting it right and not providing adequate cooling, but that will probably take longer...)

Edit: I forgot about the DRAM clock, that of course also affects performance. Changing it is not currently supported, though. The unpleasant details can probably be found somewhere in here: https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/tree/master/arch/arm/mach-sunxi

painintheworld

If someone writes a program to crank the H3's CPU voltage up for overclocking purposes, I have one that I will donate to whoever wants to see how high it will go, just for shits and giggles 😀 Fwiw, and of course I have no way to know if it is accurate, the T95 Android TV box a few of us have says it runs at 1.5Ghz. One of these first days I will try to remember to sideload CPU Float or something similar whilst the T95 is in Android TV mode and see if it really does go to 1.5.