First ARM vs. Intel Benchmarks: Cortex A9 Trounces Xeon E3

Although HP stabbed Calxeda in the back today, the small start-up has something interesting to show the industry. The company is presenting the first benchmark results of its ECX-1000 processor architecture.

The test compares a Calxeda ECX-1000 SoC that has four Cortex A9 processor cores inside to an Intel E3 Xeon based on the Sandy Bridge architecture.

The model of choice was a quad-core E3-1240 Xeon processor that runs at a fact 3.3 GHz frequency and consumes a maximum of 80 watts.

Considering that the comparison is done with a SoC, we must add the power consumption of the chipset when calculating Xeon’s power consumption.

The results show that Calxeda’s processor is 20% slower than Intel’s Xeon, but this is offset by the amazingly low power consumption of only 5.26 watts.

Xeon uses a 19 times higher 102 watts, while working at a 300% higher clock frequency.