Ivolva Digital
Pocket PC devices are sporting impressive CPU specs these days. For example, top of the line devices from HP come with 624 MHz Intel chips. Those are ARMV4I architecture chips, of course. 624 MHz is an impressive number. One immediately thinks of the implied possibilities. But just how fast are these chips compared to machines we know?

There is a good way to find out, the Linpack benchmark. Linpack measures CPU performance in floating point operations per second (FLOPS). It is a simple benchmark and results are available for thousands of systems going back several decades.

Here is a version of Linpack for Windows Mobile OS. To measure the FLOPS of your Pocket PC, copy the file to your device and launch it using File Explorer. My 624 MHz unit measured at 1.8 MFlops. For comparison, this number is between Intel 80386 and Intel 80486 or about 6 times slower than Pentium 90 Mhz. My current desktop with dual 3 Ghz Xeon chips pulls 1200 MFlops on each CPU. Hence you see that 624 Mhz number is somewhat misleading, but still a respectable performance from a palm-sized unit.

I am interested in seeing MFlop numbers for PDAs with different CPUs. Please drop me a quick mail if you run this on your own PDA. Historical Linpack numbers can be found on Jack Dongarra's page.

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