Minisforum MS-R1 ARM Mini Workstation running Linux: Benchmarks

This is a new series looking at the Minisforum MS-R1 ARM Mini Workstation running Linux. In this series, I’ll examine every aspect of this mini workstation in detail from a Linux perspective. I’ll compare the machine with other machines to put my findings into context.

The CPU setup is a 12-core hybrid design. The CIX P1 has 4 Cortex-A720 big cores and 4 Cortex-A720 medium cores, and 4 small Cortex-A520 cores. The small cores clock up to 1.8 GHz. There’s also 12 MB shared L3 cache. The machine offers up to 45 TOPS of integrated AI performance.

For this article in the series I have run a variety of benchmarks on the MS-R1 ARM Mini Workstation and compared its results to other single board computers (both ARM and RISC-V), as well as x86_64 machines. The tests are run using the Phoronix Test Suite unless stated otherwise.

I’ll mainly focus on processor benchmarks for this article, but there are a few other tests included.

The charts include the following SBCs:

MS-R1 ARM – Minisforum MS-R1 ARM Mini Workstation (ARM)
Cubie A7A – Radxa Cubie A7A (ARM)
ROCK 5T – Radxa ROCK 5T (ARM)
ROCK 4D – Radxa ROCK 4D (ARM)
RPI5 – Raspberry Pi 5 (ARM)
OPi RV2 – Orange Pi RV2 (RISC-V)
OPi5 Max – Orange Pi 5 Max (ARM)
OPi R2S – Orange Pi R2S (RISC-V)
BPI-F3 – Banana Pi BPi-F3 (RISC-V )
AIBOX-3588S – Firefly AIBOX-3588S (ARM)

I’ll also compare the performance of the MS-R1 to x86_64 machines.

N100 – Intel N100 mini PC processor
i5-10400 – Intel 10th generation desktop processor
i5-12400 – Intel 12th generation desktop processor
i5-1135G7 – Intel 11th generation laptop processor

Let’s start with processor benchmarks comparing the MS-R1 with ARM and RISC-V single board computers.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark smallpt

Smallpt is a C++ global illumination renderer written in less than 100 lines of code. Global illumination is done via unbiased Monte Carlo path tracing and there is multi-threading support via the OpenMP library.

With this benchmark, a shorter time indicates better performance. As the chart illustrates, the MS-R1 is in a different league completing the test more than twice as quick.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark compress-pbzip2

This test measures the time needed to compress a file (a .tar package of the Linux kernel source code) using BZIP2 compression.

Again a shorter time indicates better performance. The MS-R1 again completes this test so much faster than any of the other single-board computers tested. Again its 12 cores puts it at a big advantage.

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark coremark

Coremark is a benchmark that measures the performance of central processing units (CPU) used in embedded systems.

Another impressive result here.

Next page: Page 2 – Processor Benchmarks against Intel machines

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Processor Benchmarks against other ARM and RISC-V machines
Page 2 – Processor Benchmarks against Intel machines
Page 3 – Memory and Graphics
Page 4 – Disk and Networking

Complete list of articles in this series: