Much Ado about Arm and Benchmarking

It's not always easy. But at least I'm learning!

If you want to read more about what happened in my HPL benchmarks on the Radxa Orion O6 and Minisforum MS-R1 with the Cix P1, read the following issues:

- https://github.com/geerlingguy/top500-benchmark/issues/54#issuecomment-3518813579
- https://github.com/geerlingguy/top500-benchmark/issues/82#issuecomment-3514084323

And I've since updated my blog post with the new HPL performance and efficiency numbers: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/minisforum-stuffs-entire-arm-homelab-ms-r1

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Contents:

00:00 - Benchmarking is kind-of hard, actually
01:50 - Methodology and results in the open
04:02 - Big, Medium, Little cores
05:34 - Fixing what's wrong
06:49 - Reproducible benchmarks and power monitoring
09:03 - Arm vs x86 benchmarking
09:50 - Firmware on the O6
11:11 - Annoying case and cooling with a copper shim
13:34 - Lockups and slowing things down
14:28 - What went wrong