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Booting & Launching Apps

System boot times and application launch times are very important metrics to users, as they are a measure of how “snappy” a system is.

The results pretty much say all there is to say about boot and load times.

The Banana Pro (and Banana Pi performs the same) win every test.

The Raspberry Pi does surprising well compared to the dual core 1.2GHz MIPS Create CI 20, beating it in all but two tests, tying one of those two and only losing in re-opening a web browser.

It is obvious from the results that the slow boot times and slow initial load times of the CI20 are due to sub-par NAND read performance, as the cached re-openings perform much better.

I showed three different Debian revisions for the MIPS Create CI20, as I’ve been waiting for better driver support for months.

At least the load average has significantly improved  for the CI20 over the three Debian releases.

SysBench 0.4.12

I had to install automake to be able to compile sysbench, fortunately all it took was:

sudo apt-get install automake

Sysbench CPU results show total execution time in seconds for the same amount of work, which is why the CPU dual threaded results show twice the time on the single core Raspberry Pi, and half on the dual core Banana Pi.

The MIPS CI20 has superb integer performance in SysBench!

The single core CPU Test results show that the Banana Pro is almost twice as fast as the Raspberry Pi, and the MIPS CI20 is more than twice as fast for the Sysbench CPU test as the Banana Pro. In the dual core CPU test, both the MIPS and Banana get roughly 2x the single core performance, and again the MIPS CPI20 wins by a huge margin.

Memory bandwidth tells a different tale. The Banana Pro has by far the best memory performance when using both cores, with the MIPS CI20 showing a more modest gain from the second core. The Raspberry Pi is left in the proverbial dust.

iperf 2.0.5

All iperf tests were run against an 8 core / 8GB Ubuntu server on the same gigabit switch.

Results shown are in megabits per second

The best results were obtained from the Banana Pro – note that the network was NOT tuned, I have seen better results on the Banana Pi forums.

As you can see, on a 100Mbit network, the Raspberry Pi gets roughly half the performance of the  Banana Pro, and the MIPS Create CI20 is dead last with roughly half of the Raspberry Pi’s performance.

Neither the Raspberry Pi or the MIPS CI20 can touch the Banana Pro’s gigabit results.

I decided to add WiFi results for the Banana Pro and the MIPS Create CI20 as they both come with built-in WiFi adapters. The connection was to a Netgear 3500L WiFi router.

The numbers speak for themselves.

NBench  2.2.3

Results are an index relative to a Pentium 90 with 256KB L2 cache.

This single core benchmark shows when compared to the Raspberry Pi, the integer performance of the MIPS CI20 is quite good, and the Banana Pro is better yet.

Surprisingly, the floating point performance of a single core of the MIPS Create CI20 is the same as the Raspberry Pi, where the Banana Pro is more than twice as fast.

Unix Bench 5.1.3

Results are an index relative to a SPARCstation 20-61 (rated at 10.0)

Here, compared to a Raspberry Pi, single core MIPS CI20 results are a but better, and single core Banana Pro is roughly twice as fast as a Raspberry. Both the MIPS CI20 and Banana Pro approximately double their performance when using the second core, and in both single and dual core tests the Banana Pro is roughly 25% faster than the MIPS Create CI20.

For the double precision floating point test (Whetstone), the MIPS CI20 is about 20% faster than a Raspberry Pi with a single core, and about 2.5x faster when using both cores. The Banana Pro is roughly 50% faster than the MIPS CI20 in both single and dual core tests.

The hanoi results are similar – with a single core, the MIPS CI20 maintains roughly the same performance ratio compared to the Raspberry Pi, and the Banana Pro again maintains a lead similar to its lead for Whetstone against the CI20.

hdparm & dd

Unfortunately I was unable to run the hdparm benchmark on the NAND flash, as its device does not provide the necessary ioctl()

I added an SD card, and mounted it, in order to obtain dd results for the MIPS Creator CI20.

Results are in megabytes per second.

For SD card cached reads, the Banana Pro wins by a factor of two over the Raspberry Pi. The MIPS Creator CI20 is a bit slower than the Raspberry Pi.

For buffered SD reads, the Raspberry Pi beats both the MIPS CI20 and the Banana Pro.

Results are in megabytes per second.

In order to get to the bottom of the slow boot and application launch times I observed with the MIPS Creator CI20, I went back and ran an improve version of my dd benchmarks on the Raspberry Pi and Banana Pro.

By using a 1.5GB file, larger than the ram on all three boards, I was able to eliminate the caching effects that plagued my previous 128MB dd tests.

The test results are very illuminating, and explain the poor boot and launch benchmark results from the MIPS Creator CI20.

I expect the CI20 do do much better once the drivers are improved.

Article Index

1. CI20: Introduction, Does the MIPS Creator CI20 look like a Raspberry Pi?
2. CI20: Closer Look at the MIPS Creator CI20
3. CI20: Feature Comparison, Operating Systems
4. CI20: Software Compatibility, Debian, Common Application, GPIO, Multimedia
5. CI20: Hardware Compatibility, RoboPi, Pi Jumper, EZasPi, WiFi and Bluetooth, Documentation
6. CI20: Benchmark Results (Launch times, SysBench, iperf, nbench, UnixBench, dd, hdparm)
7. CI20: Power Utilization, CI20: Support, Conclusion

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