[Milkymist-devel] LM32/Milkymist vs. Microblaze/EDK

[Sébastien Bourdeauducq]

Hi,

I have run most of the MiBench [1] benchmarks on Milkymist 0.2 and Microblaze 
from EDK 10.1 in order to compare the performances of the two systems. Only 
two benchmarks are missing: tiff2rgba (it tried to use too much contiguous 
memory for the nommu Milkymist/Linux allocator to handle) and lame (it crashed 
on Microblaze).

The comparison seems clearly in favor of Milkymist, with a rough 15%-35% 
(depending on the benchmark) reduction in execution time. See the attached 
graph for a detailed view of the results.

TEST CONDITIONS
All tests were run on a Xilinx ML401 development board, with a system 
frequency of 100MHz.

For Milkymist, this is the default configuration of the port to the ML401 
board:
    * Processor with hardware multiplier, divider and barrel shifter
    * 16KB L1 instruction and data (write-through) cache (2-way set-
associative)
    * No memory management unit (not supported yet)
    * 16KB FML bridge write-back L2 cache (direct mapped)
    * HPDMC open source DDR SDRAM controller
    * 100MHz DDR SDRAM clock
    * Video output running at standard VGA resolution, using ~280MBps of 
memory bandwidth
The software used was GCC 4.2.1 and Linux 2.6.23 and the benchmarks were 
compiled according to the scripts in [2].

For Microblaze:
    * Processor with hardware multiplier, divider and barrel shifter
    * 16KB L1 instruction and data (write-through) cache (direct mapped, 
multi-way caches are not supported)
    * Full memory management unit
    * No L2 cache (not supported)
    * MPMC DDR SDRAM controller
    * 100MHz DDR SDRAM clock
    * No video output
The software used was GCC 4.1.2 and Linux 2.6.32.4 and the benchmarks were 
compiled according to the scripts in [3].

TO GO FURTHER…
I now encourage you to reproduce these results, and benchmark other soft 
system-on-chips. And let the open source architecture contest begin, for the 
greater good of high quality and open digital design!

Sébastien

[1] http://www.eecs.umich.edu/mibench/
[2] http://github.com/lekernel/milkymist-mibench
[3] http://github.com/lekernel/microblaze-mibench
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