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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.
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.
This is my main problem with the Raspberry Pi. It's very well suited to certain tasks. But there are many places where it falls behind even very old technology.
That's my biggest beef with it. It feels like a learning-computer to me, something for a student to use to study very specific aspects of system design. A physical counterpart to Minix. Yet it seems to be touted as something more capable than that.
What I need in low-end is beyond the capabilities of this device. I'm willing to accept the power consumption penalty of old equipment because I know that the old equipment won't let me down. The Raspberry Pi could be free but if it doesn't do what I need then it is useless to me.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It feels like a learning-computer to me
Funny you should say that.
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.
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.
> Ok then compare that with a 3W Intel Atom E3805
TDP is a heat dissipation requirement and is _not_ the power draw of the CPU or of a system.
What you want is a socket AM1, I use them for all kinds of jobs where you want low power but still need decent performance. you can get a Sempron quad for $33 that maxes out at 25w (and this really means max, according to kill-a-watt these things are sub 10w most of the time) and for that, the board, and a couple GB of RAM you can easily get it for less than $100.
Sure its not as cheap as the Pi but you can do a hell of a lot more with it, they even do 1080P over HDMI quite well for those that want a low power HTPC, hell you can even play games like Counter Strike Global Offensive if you want, so its got more than enough power to be a torrent box. I've sold quite a few to be office PCs,media tanks,you can make great backup/file servers out of 'em, just versatile as hell little chips.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.