How to get an ARM CPU clock speed in Linux?
- by MiKy
I have an ARM-based embedded machine based on S3C2416 board. According to the specifications I have available there should be a 533 MHz ARM9 (ARM926EJ-S according to /proc/cpuinfo), however the software running on it "feels" slow, compared to the same software on my Android phone with a 528MHz ARM CPU.
/proc/cpuinfo tells me that BogoMIPS is 266.24. I know that I should not trust BogoMIPS regarding performance ("Bogo" = bogus), however I would like to get a measurement on the actual CPU speed. On x86, I could use the rdtsc instruction to get the time stamp counter, wait a second (sleep(1)), read the counter again to get an approximation on the CPU speed, and according to my experience, this value was close enough to the real CPU speed.
How can I find the actual CPU speed of given ARM processor?
Update
I found this simple Pi calculator, which I compiled both for my Android phone and the ARM board. The results are as follows:
S3C2416
# cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor : ARM926EJ-S rev 5 (v5l)
BogoMIPS : 266.24
Features : swp half fastmult edsp java
...
#./pi_arm 10000
Calculation of PI using FFT and AGM, ver. LG1.1.2-MP1.5.2a.memsave
...
8.50 sec. (real time)
Android
# cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor : ARMv6-compatible processor rev 2 (v6l)
BogoMIPS : 527.56
Features : swp half thumb fastmult edsp java
# ./pi_android 10000
Calculation of PI using FFT and AGM, ver. LG1.1.2-MP1.5.2a.memsave
...
5.95 sec. (real time)
So it seems that the ARM926EJ-S is slower than my Android phone, but not twice slower as I would expect by the BogoMIPS figures. I am still unsure about the clock speed of the ARM9 CPU.
