It seems that the ARMv6 doesn't actually have any divide instruction in the CPU, whereas some ARMv7 variations do get it. So it's possible my naive benchmark was picking on a specific weakness of the raspberry pi's CPU. On 21/11/12 13:03, Toby Corkindale wrote:
Synopsis: ARM v6 CPUs are significantly slower than ARMv7 CPUs at the same clock speed, at least when running Debian (armhf) on them.
I know it's a rather naive benchmark, but I tried running a tiny Perl program to find all the prime numbers under 100,000 on both the Raspberry Pi and the BeagleBone.
They're both 700 MHz ARM CPUs, but the Raspberry runs on the older v6 spec CPU.
Surprisingly, this seems to make a huge difference to performance.
My desktop (3GHz i7) - 3.3 seconds BeagleBone (720 MHz ARMv7)- 68 seconds Raspberry Pi (700 MHz ARMv6) - 125 seconds