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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.
It feels like a learning-computer to me
Funny you should say that.
Yup, rough lineage:
P5: Pentium -> Pentium MMX -> nothing for a long time -> early Atom -> MIC
P6: PPro -> P-II -> P-III -> Pentium M -> Core/Core2 -> Nehalem/Westmere -> Sandy/Ivy -> Haswell/Broadwell -> Skylake
P68: Pentium4
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.