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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.
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.
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.
That's not online.
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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.
If you want to pay more than $5 there are several eBay auctions for RPiZ running right now. Yes, Adafruit is out of stock on them, but they're not the only source, again, if you're willing to pay more than $5.
"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?
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.
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.
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?
Not every task needs huge computing power. If the Pi gets the job done fast enough while burning less power than the cooling fans in your P4 system, taking up a fraction of the space and only costing ~$60 (by the time you've added a case, PSU and SD card), what's your issue?
I've got an original Pi running DNS, DHCP for my home network, and a Pi2 hooked to my lounge TV as a media center frontend served by a PC in the spare room (I suspect the Pi chipset was made for set-top-box use - it can decode 1080p mp4 without breaking a sweat) - the Pi 1 struggled a bit with the i/o throughput but the Pi2 handles the necessary with ease. Dedicating a P4 to either of those tasks - or making your toy robot twice as big so it could take the weight of a P4 heatsink - would be ridiculous unless you also needed to supplement your central heating system.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
It's running on a Pi Zero.
Required reading for internet skeptics
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.
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...
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