$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.

Comments

Re:The older systems also had more ram and pci

[CastrTroy]

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.