Most people recommends to disable hyper-threading for tasks such as signal processing on Intel CPUs.
So,there will be no difference between two CPUs, if they have same core architecture and same number of actual cores.
Not only frequency matter: instructions set (AVX2 for example) and the core internal architecture are important.
Many people have issues related to thermal capacity of the box: brick like format may decrease CPU performance if it becomes too hot.
Taking 3 different CPUs, similar SSD, Ubuntu, let’s see how OAI performs with OAI PHY unitary tests
General purpose usage: let’s compile the OAI PHY simulators
| N3160 Ubuntu 17.04 | i5-4300M Ubuntu 16.04 | i5-6600K Ubuntu 17.04 |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Total cpu cost cumulated all cores | 395 sec | 146 sec | 75 sec |
| Elapsed time | 216s sec | 80 sec | 40 sec |
Now, we run OAI phy processing on one core
| N3160 | i5-4300M | i5-6600K | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Detected cpu_freq | 1.6 GHz (turbo: 2.2GHz) | 2.6 GHz (Turbo 3.3GHz) | 3.5 GHz (overclock: 4.1GHz) |
| UE mode: Total PHY proc tx | 339.031893 us | 72.814188 us | 50.013725 us |
| UE mode: only ULSCH multiplexing time | 20.204291 us | 7.258590 us | 5.122038 us |
| eNB mode: total time | 483.742061 us | 86.693388 us | 62.064970 us |
Conclusion:
N3160, that is recent Atom core architecture (Braswell) is much slower than main stream core architecture.
On main stream CPUs, Intel improved but not that much between Haswell architecture and Skylake.
The difference between the two i5-xxxx is also small because both have AVX2 instructions.
Intel developed more the GPU part between gen 4 (Haswell) and gen 6 (Skylake).
If we take a older CPU like ix-3xxx or before, the difference will be larger for same frequency.
If some people perform similar tests with i7-xxxx or Xeon, they will find out the same values for the same core architecture, no matter the commercial denomination.