Recommended arm hardware (mostly for compilation)?

[Mark Millard]

On 2020-May-17, at 00:21, Philipp Klaus Krause <pkk at spth.de> wrote:

> Am 14.05.20 um 17:30 schrieb Dan Kotowski:
>> I have a SolidRun HoneyComb workstation board based on the LX2K and
>> can confirm it's quite powerful, however I have only been able to get
>> Linux-based systems running - I have not been able to get FreeBSD
>> working, but am working on it. SolidRun provides all the sources
>> necessary to do so, it's just a matter of interpreting all the
>> documentation.
> 
> Do you have any experience of how this board performs vs the MACCHIATObin?
> 
> Both have A72 cores at 2 Ghz. The LX2K has 16 cores vs 4 cores on the
> MACCHIATObin, but I wonder if typical compilation workloads are able to
> use all cores vs. being I/O or memory-bandwidth-starved.
> 
> The other main advantage of the LX2K would be dual-channel memory. But I
> wonder if that worth the price difference.

I do not have LX2K experience, but . . .

An illustration of the type of question: I have access to
both a MACCHIATObin DoubleShot (A72 based) and a OverDrive
1000 (A57 based). Turns out the OverDrive 1000 is faster at
parallel builds overall vs. the MACCHIATObin being so for
single-threaded activity. The OverDrive 1000 has dual
channel memory. Both are configured to have SATA SSDs of
the same type and the I/O does not seem to contribute
differently for builds. (The file system context is UFS
for both.)

As an example (from memory), a poudriere bulk build
session set up to do the same on both got results like:

OverDrive 1000:          15 hours
MACCHIATObin DoubleShot: 18 hours

(in round figures). The poudriere configurations
for both allowed 4 jobs at once, each job allowed to
use 4 processes per job. (So much of the time the
load average was more than 4.) For both there was
enough RAM that the builds avoided swapping/paging,
if I remember right.

Sounds like a LX2K would be an interesting thing to
compare with.

===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com
( dsl-only.net went
away in early 2018-Mar)