[Cake] some comprehensive arm64 w/cake results

[David P. Reed]

I appreciate the effort that went into this testing. However, there are some signficant concerns regarding saying that this is typical ARM64 performance. (ARM64 easily beats many Intel x86_64 CPUs, if the motherboards are designed for that - I have a very nice SolidRun 16 core ARM64 board based on the NXP ARMs, and the Chinese make a lot of servers)

It should be noted that all the Pi's tested are configured with the *lousy* Ethernet interface that is standard on Pi's (USB). I don't know about the Jetsons (I own a Jetson, but have never tested its networking or even looked at the design of the I/O).

Now the Pi CM4 *module* is capable of connecting to a PCIe Ethernet adapter (using 1 lane PCIe gen 2 x1, which supports 4 Gb/sec transfers, enough for GigE wirespeed). Jeff Geerling has demonstrated various cards get superior performance.
https://www.hackster.io/news/jeff-geerling-squeezes-4-15gb-s-from-a-raspberry-pi-compute-module-4-using-a-pcie-network-card-bb373ca52966

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-compute-module-4-four-pcie-slots is a nice "motherboard" for the CM4 module that carries 4 PCIe slots.

So even the Pi CM4 should be able to beat up the Intel processors in a fair fight!

I should also note that Armbian's kernel isn't a particularly high performance kernel build.

Again, good job on getting results, but as somebody who has worked on measuring  Linux OS performance on various CPU architectures, I'd be very, very cautious about drawing conclusions about *ARM* from this.

If you want to test Cake on ARM64, you should perhaps set up an AWS ARM64 machine (Graviton CPUs, and good Ethernet adapters) which won't cost much money when you are charged by the hour.

The same caution applies to RISC-V systems. It's NOT the cpu architecture that you want to measure - it's tne networking architectures that are almost always crippled in some way on small boards.

Let's not reinforce the distortion that Intel is so great!

BTW, I don't know if a Pi CM4 with a couple of GigE ports would make a good home router at a reasonable price point. But it seems to me it could be a great candidate. It's a pretty fast machine and its network can definitely support two GigE ports.


On Sunday, September 17, 2023 9:05pm, "Dave Taht via Cake" <cake at lists.bufferbloat.net> said:

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> A huge thanks to dave seddon for buckling down and doing some comprehensive
> testing of a variety of arm64 gear!
> 
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HxIU_TEBI6xG9jRHlr8rzyyxFEN43zMcJXUFlRuhiUI/edit#heading=h.bpvv3vr500nw
> 
> --
> Oct 30: https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
>