This is the third article in a new series looking at the latest piece of kit from the folks at Orange Pi. It’s the Orange Pi 6 Plus development board.
This board is very different to the single-board computers I’ve previously looked at. For example, it has a 12 core 64 bit ARMv9 processor with a total computing power of 45 TOPS (CPU/GPU/NPU).
The board has the CIX CD8180/CD8160 SoC. The 12-core processor has a quad-core Cortex-A720 large core, quad-core Cortex-A720 medium core, and quad-core Cortex-A520 small core.
lscpu shows the maximum clock speed of the cores. As you can see, the large core (the first two cores listed below) have a maximum clock frequency of 2600 MHz, the next four 1800 MHz, the next two 2300 MHz, the next two 2200 MHz, and the final two cores have a maximum clock frequency of 2500 MHz.
In the second article in this series I ran a series of benchmarks on the machine using all the cores. But let’s see how the individual cores perform on a couple of the benchmarks.
I’ve run the benchmarks on CPU 0, 2, 6, 8, and 10 as they have unique maximum clock speeds (i.e. CPU 1 has the same maximum clock speed as CPU 0).
taskset -c 0 phoronix-test-suite benchmark smallpt
taskset -c 2 phoronix-test-suite benchmark smallpt
taskset -c 6 phoronix-test-suite benchmark smallpt
taskset -c 8 phoronix-test-suite benchmark smallpt
taskset -c 10 phoronix-test-suite benchmark smallpt
A lower time indicates better performance.
taskset -c 0 phoronix-test-suite benchmark coremark
taskset -c 2 phoronix-test-suite benchmark coremark
taskset -c 6 phoronix-test-suite benchmark coremark
taskset -c 8 phoronix-test-suite benchmark coremark
taskset -c 10 phoronix-test-suite benchmark coremark
A higher number of iterations per second indicates better performance.
What do I infer from the above charts? I think the results are very interesting. 8 out of the 12 cores offer similar performance. In other words the quad-core Cortex-A720 large core and quad-core Cortex-A720 medium core don’t have a massive speed difference.
What’s particularly noteworthy is quad-core Cortex-A520 small core performance is much worse. They are CPU 2 (and 3, 4, 5) with the lowest maximum clock speed of 1800 MHz. And their performance is much slower than the clock speed might suggest.
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Orange Pi 6 Plus | |
|---|---|
| Introduction | Introduction to the series and interrogation of the single-board computer |
| Benchmarks | Benchmarking the Orange Pi 6 Plus |
| Cores | The 3 different types of core |