ARM Beats Intel With Revised AnTuTu Benchmark

Jim McGregor
EETimes (7/12/2013 12:50 PM EDT)

The AnTuTu Benchmark, a benchmarking tool for Android smartphones and tablets, has been revised following some discrepancy over whether the latest Intel Atom processor outperformed ARM-based chips from several vendors in key aspects of the benchmark. Under the revised benchmark, overall scores for the Atom Z2580 dropped by about 20 percent.

As I indicated in a post on EE Times earlier this week, there appeared to be some discrepancies with the AnTuTu benchmark in relation to older versions of the benchmark and other benchmarks. (See: Has Intel Really Beaten ARM?) Technical consulting firm BDTI pointed out that the compiled code for the Intel processor was not executing all instructions that were intended for the RAM test. This artificially improved the results for the Lenovo K900 smartphone and the Intel Atom processors. The problem appears to arise from the ICC compiler introduced around version 2.9.4 of the AnTuTu benchmark and used just for the Intel processors. Code for all other processors uses a different compiler, called the GCC.

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