Re: ARM 64?

[Mathew McBride <matt@traverse.com.au>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1859 bytes --]

Hi Michael,

Just in response to your questions:
On 25/5/18, 11:10 pm, "Michael Tremer" <michael.tremer(a)ipfire.org> wrote:
    
    
    I think you hardware is good enough for a builder. But I still am not sure what
    to expect from the CPU. It will be faster than a Raspberry Pi, but not a
    Mustang.
    
We did some benchmarks with the Phoronix test suite a while ago, this will give you an idea:
http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1708303-TR-1703199RI93&obr_hgv=Traverse+LS1043+Prototype

To give an idea of the Cortex (ARM designed)-based core performance:

The LS1043 has the same A53 cores as the RPi3, but performs better due to having more cache, DDR4 etc (and higher clock).
A72 is about double A53 in performance (and power consumption!) per MHz, as A72 is a modern out-of-order speculative core (it did get hit with the Meltdown/Spectre issue).

The latest gen of ARM64 server cores would all be well above A72, your Mustang is probably around the A72 level.

In general, ARM network SoCs try to work 'smarter' instead of 'harder', so the high network performance comes from having very good network silicon, taking advantage of crypto accelerators etc.

    
    > There is a TrustZone firmware running in the ring/EL above the OS, for the NXP
    > Layerscape/QorIQ SoC's this firmware is open source, and not strictly required
    > to run the system (it gets loaded by u-boot after power on).
    
    What does the firmware do?
It implements some vendor-specific power-management extensions (PSCI), as well as some TPM-like functions.
NXP provides a good overview: https://github.com/qoriq-open-source/ppa-generic/blob/integration/ReleaseNotes.txt
I am not a security expert, but it could be a good test environment for secure boot, private key storage and other things.

    
Cheers,
Matt