That's strange because my Motorola Xoom running Ubuntu in a chroot and vnc'd in overclocked at 1.4 GHz is roughly on par with my 1.6 GHz Atom based netbook on every real-world benchmark I have thrown at it. I don't think you're giving ARM enough credit.
Posted Mar 6, 2012 7:48 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
He compared 1.2GHz ARM and 1.2GHz P3.
P3 was much faster then [original] Pentium (which was adopted for Atom design) - this means that if your Xoom has reached parity with Atom (and indeed this is about where Cortex-A9 is) then it's still significantly slower then P3 (and P3 itself is significantly slower then contemporary AMD/Intel CPUs at the same frequency: it's quite old design, after all).
Cortex-A15 should be much closer to contemporary AMD/Intel CPUs but it's not yet readily available thus it's speed are mostly speculations at this point.