Benchmarking the Beaglebone Black

Two years ago I took a great seminar (graduate class) by Prof. Ayse Coskun (her last name is pronounced “Josh-Kun”) that covered heterogeneous computer architectures, including things like server design incorporating different types of processors and single-die CPUs with multiple architectures on one chip. The Beaglebone Black is a much more exotic CPU than most hobbyists realize, since it is a “1.5.5 core” processor due to the two Programmable Realtime Units inside. These two sub-cores share a memory access bus with the main core but can function independently otherwise and over the past several years Texas Instruments has finally provided some support for programming these things.

I wrote a report (included at bottom) looking at the throughput of the single-threaded, single-core main processor using the Phoronix and MiBench test suites as well as a lot of bash scripting.

Phoronix is fantastic because it is easy to use and produces the nice blue horizontal-bar graphs that are in my report. I highly recommend it. To create the other multicolored vertical graphs I used Google Docs’ spreadsheet program, and the whole report was produced in Google Docs.

Link to PDF: BeagleboneBlackBenchmarks