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$5 Raspberry Pi Zero Compared To Intel's NetBurst CPUs & Newer (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Curious about the performance of a Raspberry Pi Zero, Phoronix has published a number of Raspberry Pi 2 + Pi Zero performance benchmarks with paired power consumption data. They found the Pi Zero performed slower than even an Intel Celeron 320 from the NetBurst era, but that the Raspberry Pi 2 was performing between that Celeron and a Pentium 4 "C" 2.8GHz CPU from 2004. While the Raspberry Pis didn't win in raw performance, the performance-per-Watt of the Raspberry Pi 2 was 220x greater than the Pentium Northwood. The Pi Zero had an average power consumption of 2.7 Watts and the Raspberry Pi 2 was at 3.5 Watts; however, compared to newer Broadwell and Skylake processors, Intel's low-end parts delivered greater power efficiency while the Raspberry Pi had the best value.
Oh look! A list of bigger/more expensive/no GPIO devices that are better than the Pi at all the things the Pi shouldn't be used for.
I'm not buying a Pi Zero because I don't need a small $5 device with programmable GPIO, but if I did need a small $5 device with a programmable GPIO, I find it highly unlikely I would use a single one of these other things.
The older systems also had more ram and pci / agp / some even had pci-e.
While in some benchmarks, the Pi 2 can keep up, it's clear it's overshadowed at times by the P4s.
What I want to know is, if we have a cluster of Pi 2s that consume the same amount of power as the P4, how different are the results?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
The RPiZ is not available online anywhere in the USA or Canada, which means it's not available anywhere else in the multiverse!
In all fairness, almost everything modern would wipe the floor with the Netburst CPUs in terms of power efficiency, even back then. They were basically slow hotplates, and the Tualatin Pentium IIIs ran circles around the early Pentium 4s. I find it funny that Intel's Core architecture renaissance came from bringing back P6.
If you had enough Pi boards to use the same amount of electricity as the Pentium 4, the stack of Pis would have 220 times as much computational power.
One P4 runs a bit faster than a Pi, and uses a LOT more power.
Of course that fact is probably not of any practical use. There are use cases for which a Pi is the right tool for the job, there are uses for which a typical desktop is the right tool for the job, and there are use cases for which the Arduino is the right tool for the job - and there isn't that much overlap. If you need a lot of computing power, you use a powerful processor, not a bunch of Raspberry Pi boards.
The power consumption does point out that there is virtually no good use case for a P4 - it's cheaper to buy a newer CPU than to power a P4.
The Pis use the usb bus for everything, except Video (HDMI/Composite), Audio, GPIO, and maybe the SD port. Ethernet, wifi, etc. use the USB bus, which doesn't respond well to heavy IO loads, whether due to hardware failings of the broadcom soc, design issues with the board, or power limitations of design.
There is a footnote to my comment that there is virtually no good use for a P4. It might make sense where the machine is a) free and b) rarely powered on. I actually have such a use case; my Christmas light controller is only powered on for a few hours per year. Therefore the power savings of buying something newer may not offset the cost to do so.
Oh, first poster, how great thou art,
Merrily leading us to a great conversation
Granting ceaseless discourse and insight
Sending bits into the net filled with love
Telling us the true inner thoughts of your soul
Fighting your way for meaning toward the front of the pack
Unnamed anonymous hero, I salute you
So...what's new is old again? /shrug
Anyone have a mirror? Site is currently belly up.
They're just a way to make slower chips look better when they really aren't. If it gets the job done faster, what's the real issue?
I'll take a Netburst P4 over the R.Pi any day just for spite and proper USB implementation.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Intel had up until that point kept technical leaders up top and had the marketing guys in lower to middle management where they could make them money, but not muck up the technical decisions too much. Barret and Otellini broke that trait and lead to the intel we have today. Don't forget the Rambus mess than Intel helped incite. It took what, 3 years for Intel to backpedal from the RDRAM mess, provide SDRAM equivalents of the RDRAM chipsets, and then *FINALLY* get competitive with AMD by producing their own DDR chipsets (Which wouldn't have been necessary if they hadn't fucked over all their chipset partners the previous generation by pulling a Microsoft and killing the third party chipset industry.)
What is this article talking about? According to those benchmarks, the Pi2 and Pi Zero barely even touch the celery 2.4 and in the one benchmark, it looks like a Pentium 200 could beat the Pi Zero. Can't say I really expected any different. ARM is not built for performance, it's built for efficiency only. Le sigh.
I use it in at least one application where I need a simple server that consumes negligible power, has a wired network connection, has no moving parts, read-only FS and for all the above reasons will probably run for years and years without failing.
I thought about using an old PC or server but the noise, power and space requirements, long-term reliability, cooling requirements and electricity bills are kind of off-putting.
More importantly the originally raspi is based on a chip that was intended for a different purpose. The bcm2835 was first and foremost a video processor capable of hd video encode and decode.
The arm(which everyone benchmarks) has a simple role to play in the intended configuration: Run linux, so that you can write simple GUIs and send compressed video data to the videocore. 3d Graphics acceleration was probably and afterthought.
You're comparing apples and oranges because the raspi community repurposed the chip. The raspi2 arm is a bit better. The biggest advantage now is the price, but this comparison is ridiculous.
"The Pi Zero had an average power consumption of 2.7 Watts and the Raspberry Pi 2 was at 3.5 Watts";
Ok then compare that with a 3W Intel Atom E3805 if you want a modern performance per watt metric. Guess what the outcome will be?
They didn't realize that Mhz increases would get stalled for so long. Prior to this, they had been able to keep cranking up the Mhz for performance increases. So they tried to design for something to help that keep going. Problem was they got stalled for a LONG time at ~3Ghz and had to start working on more work/cycle and multi-threading, etc. Heck, even today, I don't know of a whole lot of end-user CPU's with a clock much faster than ~ 4Ghz (granted, I no longer read up on every little detail of CPU news I can get my hands on like I did years ago.)
Why is everyone trying to build a desktop PC out of these things? As a $5 embedded platform they are massively overpowered for all sorts of projects, yet the only thing these articles ever rate it on is PC type tasks.
Actually they may be competitive against old desktop PCs that have been retired to the closet as headless Linux servers. Read/write the data for the device being provided to a NAS box that has been mounted. Might work for a personal/home server. I'm thinking non-media applications, source code control, documentation wikis, etc. Less power and much quieter than a repurposed desktop. Again, note a NAS box has the data, the sdcard only the operating system and configuration.
the x86-64 won. you can have a low power one, a fast one, a multicored-one, a supercomputer of them. sad since a bit nonlinear architecture but it is what it is.
Have not played with one of these but I have several A and B+ being used daily.
One is my voip system using Nerd Vittles PIAF http://nerdvittles.com/?p=1015...
The other does my weather station
http://weewx.com/
The other does my BBQ controller
https://github.com/CapnBry/Hea...
Sure there are many more uses.
The new board may save a bit in my new builds will see...
All running quite fine...
So yes they have their place, low power, and reliable, no fan.
Intel didn't really "catch up" to AMD. Intel fumbled in the P4 era, this let AMD have a temporary reprieve and get ahead, then Intel resumed its normal position out in front, where they usually are. AMD briefly and temporarily caught up to Intel.
Nothing beats the newest Intel NUCs on performance per watt. I have a bunch of raspberry pi 2 boards and a I Pi Zero i was lucky enough to get, and i paid $5 + tax on it retail. When it came time to build a playback-only HTPC, i used a NUC. I paired the NUC5CPYH (braswell?) with 2 GB of RAM and OpenElec on a class 10 SD card. It also comes in a nice casing, wifi and integrated IR receiver all for about $150 retail. I could build up a pi 2 for about half that cost, but it wouldnt be nearly as performant, look as nice, or be as well integrated. The icing on the cake is that USB and the other internal busses are properly implemented (1GB ethernet vs 10/100, USB 3.0 with UASP vs USB 2.0) AND it can run x86-64 Linux and Windows....
Good-bye
If you are interested in the power consumption of the Pi, you should probably check out this: http://www.midwesternmac.com/b...
> Well, a desktop from 2004 was far from useless.
It WAS not useless at the time. In fact, it was sometimes worth paying $100-$1200* per year to power it and run the air conditioning to get rid of the heat it generated.
Now, you can get similar performance from a $40 machine that uses $1-$10 of electricity. Given the choice of spending $100+ to use a P4 for a year or spending $41 to use a Pi for a year, the P4 loses.
Further, rent for apartment or office space is about $1/month or so. The P4 takes up $50 / year worth of valuable space.
* cost of power varies greatly, from a home in Texas to a datacenter in California.
Yes a bicycle uses less gasoline than a automobile, and is far more efficient. But a bicycle is not practical in every situation.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Way to miss the entire point twice. Sure, you CAN keep using that P4, on that old motherboard. Depending on where you live and how much you use the AC, and local electricity prices, it's costing you $100-$300 every year to run.
You could instead pay LESS every year and getter BETTER performance a modern low-power, low cost chip. You're paying more and getting worse performance. You -can- do that. You -can- hit yourself with a hammer too.
Raspberry pi is useful in a zombie apocalypse as long as you can find AA batteries. Your MacBook and P4 are useless.
Good luck finding one. Supply vs demand is keeping these out of stock everywhere.
Somewhere on the Internet(tm) I recently read an article comparing SD memory card speeds with the RPi. They varied by as much as 10x. For the most part, brand-name cards did better, and IIRC, medium-sized cards tended to be faster (small ones are usually cheap, large ones are trading speed for size), but it varied a lot - as long as the card's write speed was fast enough for a typical video-camera to record in real time, that's all the manufacturer cared about, and read speeds have bigger numbers so those are the ones they splash on to the packaging.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yeah, but when you want low-power, fast, tiny and cheap at the same time, there's not much offered with x86-64.
My friend used to work at Broadcom, and told the following story:
Broadcom had a video decoder chip, but there was a lower limit on chip size due to the space needed to connect the terminals. So there was unused silicon; they stuck an ARM core there.
See also here about how it boots:
http://raspberrypi.stackexchan...
My 20 year old Cray T3E blows both my Pi2 and 2015 MacBook Pro out of the water. Battery life is awful though...
There are lots of other computers in the world, small and large. Plenty are faster or cheaper or bluer than the Raspberry-Pi, but almost all miss the point: R-Pi is not about the hardware. It's about the ecosystem - the images you can install, kits you can buy, the tutorials in magazines and on YouTube, the jams, the general buzz around it that makes people (and their focus is kids in particular) interested in playing with it.
Owl tried to think of something wise to say, but couldn't.
Raspberry Pi was never designed for heavy workload, this is why this comparison is ridiculous - it is a bit like comparing apple and oranges. However the comparison is still very interesting, as it tells us how far our technology has advanced.
I have five of them, however they're still attached to the covers of the magazine they came 'free' with... I'm reluctant to remove them, and instead stick them on ebay.
Yup - that's the one. (And of course I read it just after I'd bought a couple of SD cards for my RPi and other devices :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks