SAM 460 poor performance, high price

[yakumo9275]

its a shame the ppc guys are not making boards like the pandaboard does arm from TI.

imagine for $180, dual core 1ghz, 1gb ram, opengl es 2.0, blue tooth, wireless, onboard ethernet, sd card slot, dvi/hdmi out in tiny formfactor size..

ah well dreams

[yakumo9275]

What does any of this have to do with the SAM460EX? And while the SAM460EX is overpriced, in what fashion is it slow? I would be willing to bet its memory bandwidth is significantly higher than a Pegasos or a Powermac.

At 1.15 Ghz, this is the fastest board Acube has produced.

it does; Andreas benchmarked it; other than video bus, mac min beat it out.
here

Andreas_Wolf wrote:

Comparison Sam460ex at 1.167 GHz (OS4) vs. Mac mini G4 at 1.5 GHz (MorphOS):

Sam460ex results:

---> VIDEO BUS <---
READ: 72 MB/Sec
WRITE: 261 MB/Sec

Mac mini G4 results (my machine):

---> VIDEO BUS <---
READ: 32 MB/Sec
WRITE: 180 MB/Sec

[yakumo9275]

dont forget the video ram numbers too

[yakumo9275]

I pointed out that it may at some point outperform a G5 Mac on memory transfers since it used at best DDR2-533 and SAM460 *might* support faster memory (ala DDR2-800 or 1033) and also support faster video cards since is has native PCIex16 support.

in actuality, its a 4x pcie-lane, and once you take protocol overhead out of the 4x lane, it pushes the same amount as the macmini agp 4x slot. so any of the g4/g5 macs that have an agp 8x slot can push more video bandwidth than the sam460.

iirc, pcie 4x lane minus the overhead is about 1000mb/s, agp 4x is about 1033 or 1066 mbs but I dont recall if the agp 4x numbers are with protocol overhead removed.