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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.
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.
I had one that I wanted to use as to download my torrents. It turns out that downloading to the SD Card caused the thing to lock up because it was writing data faster than the device could handle it. I was able to get around this problem by writing to a USB stick. It no longer crashed, but there was still a bottleneck writing to disk, which caused the torrents to download significantly slower than they did on my desktop.
It wasn't even due to bad memory stick or SD card. It was similar SD card and memory sticks that I used on my tablet that allow full speed torrent downloads. But something about the architechture of the Raspberry Pi that caused any kind of extensive writing to the SD or USB to cause a CPU spike every few seconds.
These tiny ARM computers probably have enough CPU and RAM at this point to run as a desktop. But until they get proper interfaces for hooking up storage and networking, they won't be of much use to anybody.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
"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?
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
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...