Benchmarking Raspberry Pi performance
Raspberry isn't about performance, but about programming, electronics and all the cool ideas people can think of... but how does it actually perform? How does various ARM based mini computers compare to each other?
Using Phoronix test suite I've run few tests to check Raspberry Pi, Odroid-X2 and my laptop performance. Due to limited amount of tests running on ARM I had to use simple tests (plus Raspberry won't complete those tests quickly).
Using phoronix-test-suite I've run nine tests checking computer graphics, RAM and CPU performance:
- x11perf: very basic X.org performance test
- RAMspeed SMP: RAM speed
- C-Ray: testing CPU floating-point operations performance
- Dcraw: measuring time needed to convert RAW NEF photo to PPM using dcraw
- Lame encoding: measuring time needed to convert WAV to MP3
- Sample Pi Program: measuring time needed to calculate pi number
- PyBench: Python performance benchmark
- PHPBench: the same thing for PHP
- NGINX Benchmark: measure amount of HTTP requests handled per second
You can see all the results on openbenchmarking. If you have phoronix-test-suite installed then you can compare your computer performance by executing:
For Raspberry that's around two days! For good PC hour or two.
Looking through results
Below are four charts taken from the results page.
RAM speed test
Converting RAW to PPM
Converting WAV to MP3
Floating-point operations benchmark
It's quite obvious that Raspberry won't be fast. Odroid-X2 with quad core CPU and 2 GB of RAM is much faster. Intel Core i5 based laptop is vastly faster. Even so Raspberry is popular and it's on a rise as you don't need awesome performance to hack some electronics into a working circuit or a robot, or to make a mini server, music/video player.
Odroid-X2 is one of the strongest ARM based mini computers. Newer Cortex A15 should be even faster (Arndale board?) allowing to challenge Intel Ultrabooks with performance while keeping lower power usage. In case of Odroid you can run Linaro Ubuntu, which will work almost like on a typical PC. However on ARM some apps are missing, especially those closed source: flash plugin, or developer apps: PyCharm, Sublime Text and alike. Mali 400 GPU isn't that good as on Android. Due to licensing, proprietary problems it's harder to get them and make them working. High scores doesn't allow it to run for example OpenArena, UrbanTerror or other 3D games which are playable with integrated HD 3000 or 4000 from Intel. Open source nVidia Tegra drivers alongside nVidia efficient graphics should provide a solution to such problems. That could allow a real ARM based laptops (with Linux) to emerge.
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