Thread: How fast is the Alchemy CPU?

There sure seems to be a gain of momentum in the mobile market with faster ARM-based CPUs, and if I understand correctly, the Cortex A8 yields up to 800 MIPS @600 MHz and the Dragonfly up to 2000MIPS @ 1GHz.

Then there are those Alchemy processors which can be found in some of Cowon's devices. They sure brag how powerful they are and how many megahertz they can do but nothing about its performance.

So, does anyone know how well they perform on benchmarks, how many MIPS, FLOPS or at least CPI does the Au1250 and the Au1300 do? I suspect they are not that good for otherwise the manufacturer wouldn't put such an effort to hide this from the sheets.

If they're based on ARMv11 then they should be fairly close to Cortex-A8 (an extension of ARMv11) in terms of MIPS/Hz.

Cowon are multimedia devices, so the focus on them should be about software being optimized to use built-in codec decoding extensions for lower CPU usage rather than pure MIPS number. If used in a gaming device then the focus shifts to support and performance of OpenGL ES 2.0.