Is Intel within ARM’s reach? Pedestrian Detection shows the way

Sigh. Although some of this is Intel&#x27;s own doing, &quot;i3&quot; is not a meaningful descriptor, especially when compared to &quot;Cortex-A15&quot; or &quot;Cortex-A9&quot;. &quot;Core i3&quot; can refer to many, many generations of CPUs; this is not a nitpick, but a real complaint, because each of those CPUs have very different performance characteristics. Core i3 has been a Westmere (Nehalem tick); a Sandy Bridge; an Ivy Bridge (Sandy Bridge tick); and a Haswell. Saying &quot;a 1.2GHz Core i3&quot; is about as valuable, then, as saying &quot;a Tegra&quot; -- which could be an ARM11 MPCore (Tegra 6xx); a Cortex-A9 without NEON (Tegra 2); a Cortex-A9 with NEON (Tegra 3); or a Cortex-A15 (Tegra 4).<p>So, on a micro-level, the comparison is not terribly valid. On a macro-level -- saying that the devices are within an order of magnitude -- the results are reasonable, but certainly not novel...

So code fully optimized for ARM&#x2F;Cortex-A15 is almost as fast as only partially optimized code on a 1.2 GHz i3? Well, good to know I guess.

Spoiler: no. 1265 ms vs 439 ms on their OpenCV benchmark.<p>(Then they play some what-if games by underlocking the i3 in imaginative ways and applying SIMD opts to only the ARM side)

I am getting tired of this whole dumb x86 vs. arm comparison bullshit. You cannot compare chips (read: chips not even talking about architecture here because it&#x27;s not relevant) which are designed for complete different purposes (high performance big ooo workstation cpu vs. low power mobile chip). Please stop making those.

Intel will be in a lot of trouble soon (within 2-3 years).<p>Forget the Core line chips. That&#x27;s irrelevant. It will remain a cash cow for the next few years, but a rapidly shrinking cash cow nonetheless. They&#x27;ll move upmarket with them, until there&#x27;s nowhere to move to.<p>ARM chips&#x27; improvements over the next years will make them &quot;good enough&quot; for most people, and Intel&#x27;s Core chips which cost 10x more (literally) will be very uncompetitive in that environment.<p>Their only solution is to fight with Atom, but so far no success there, and even if they succeed, it means their profits will lower dramatically, and they need to survive as a company with much lower revenue and profit, which means the &quot;all-powerful Intel&quot; of the past will be but a faint memory in the future.

In addition to what zurn said, they also don&#x27;t specify the exact Core i3 model number (it could be an older generation), the RAM speed, and if the data set fits in cache.<p>If RAM access is needed ARM machines usually fall behind quickly, since they usually have much lower RAM bandwidth.

You Cant Scale a Server&#x2F;Desktop CPU two step down into Mobile Devices.<p>This is what Atom is all about, the higher power&#x2F;performance x86 possible.<p>And You also cant scale a Mobile Devices up to a Server &#x2F; Desktop Product.<p>That is what the ARMv8 Cortex A58 is all about, Low Power Desktop and Server Class.<p>So technically speaking both are marching towards each others end. Although Intel would lose out due to other factor such as business model.

For those who are not convinced. Here is one more benchmark.<p><a href="http://www.inpai.com.cn/doc/hard/198143_8.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inpai.com.cn&#x2F;doc&#x2F;hard&#x2F;198143_8.htm</a><p>Page takes a while to load. Then scroll down to the benchmarks. Take a look at the single threaded Linpack benchmarks between i7@3.5GHz and Exynos@1.6GHz.