As part of one of the special OpenHours session for HiKey960 launch, we did a demo on Hikey and HiKey960 to compare the performance of the 2 boards. We ran a 1080p/30fps video on vlc using software decoder on both the devices running same codebase from AOSP master for the comparision. Here is the link to the Openhours session in which we did the demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6AVlw4VwRQ

We saw that HiKey could decode and render the video with an average load of ~50% on the board. HiKey was running at 960Mhz and occasionally dropping to 729 Mhz for most part of the video playback with all 8 cores getting actively used. Below is the graphical representation of CPU usage on HiKey while playing the clip:

Demo 96boards Openhours Hikey960 launch Image 1

One can see that there is portion of the timeline where the load has reduced but during which there were frame drops happening as system was trying to catchup.

We captured the CPU usage for the same portion of the clip on HiKey960. We saw that the load was less than 10% consistently. HiKey960 was running at 533 Mhz for most part of the video playback and occasionally frequency jumped to 999 Mhz.

Demo 96boards Openhours Hikey960 launch Image 2

We further tried to stress the boards by trying to play a 1080p/60fps video but there were too many frame drops and stutters on HiKey where as HiKey960 was able to play the video smoothly with an average load of ~35% at 999Mhz consistently:

Demo 96boards Openhours Hikey960 launch Image 3

We have used a debug build of VLC player and Android Monitor for the above demo. Users can follow the instructions available on source.android.com on how to build AOSP for HiKey960

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