Hackberry A10 - Java benchmarks

Having not seen any benchmarks for running Java on a A10 device, I thought I would performed some benchmarks using dacapo bench suite. Currently the Oracle JDK for ARM is only available for armel, armhf is reportedly faster therefore I conducted these tests with OpenJDK 7 (IcedTea7 2.1.2) using my debian wheezy image with a hard-float compiled kernel.

OpenJDK 7 includes support for 3 JVM's - JamVM, Cacao and Zero/Shark. Unfortunately Cacao failed to run with dacapo therefore there it is excluded from our tests. OpenJDK7 is currently classed as 'testing' in the Debian repository which may explain the Cacao failure.

Below are the results for JamVM and Zero, times are in milliseconds.

Dacapo Test		JamVM	Zero/Shark
avrora		278216	196867
eclipse		1173809	837472
fop		46093	35759
jython		553172	373691
luindex		56140	52659
lusearch		243673	202925
pmd		88551	97203
sunflow		1283857	729727
tomcat		131739	FAILED
xalan		305040	255660

Overall Zero performs better than JamVM apart from the failure in the tomcat test. There is another JVM available for OpenJDK that is  Avain it's a small lightweight and fast JVM. There is a Arm port available in the Debian repository unfortunately it is classed as 'unstable' and I couldn't get it to execute with dacapo. It is possible to compile Avain from source unfortunately I didn't have time to do so. 

If we compare these results to similar benchmarks for the Raspberry PI, then OpenJDK 7 does seem to redeem itself on the A10 platform. Although we are not comparing apples with apples (cortex A8 v ARM1176) it is encouraging to see that the figures compete with Oracle JDK 7 (amel) albeit on the PI. Oracle JDK 7 is know to perform better than OpenJDK and it is a shame we still don't have an armhf version to benchmark against. Hopefully Oracle will release something soon!