Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ Benchmarks Show Significantly Improved Performance (phoronix.com)

fstack writes: Pi Day was marked this year by the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ as the next evolution to this $35 ARM single-board computer. Phoronix has now put out Raspberry Pi 3 B+ benchmarks showing that the Ethernet performance is indeed much faster now but still doesn't stack up to other high performance boards, the SoC temperature is noticeably lower than the very warm Raspberry Pi 3, and the overall performance is a nice upgrade while retaining the same price point as its predecessors. Follow up tests looking at the Wi-Fi performance also show the new 802.11ac dual-band wireless to be much faster as well.

Comments

Memory

[QuietLagoon]

I'd really like to see a Pi Model 3 B++ model that has 2GB memory. :)

Re:Memory

[JeremyR]

The Odroid C2 may fit the bill. I have two of them and am pretty impressed.

Re:Memory

[amiga3D]

What for? You can pick up a computer out of the trash that'll leave it in the dust as a desktop. The Pi is for tinkering and hobbyists and teaching. It's a throwaway design that you can blow away and go "oh well." More ram will consume more power in a design where most users are counting milliamps. Most of mine are running off of solar powered batteries. It's fascinating to watch what people can find to use them for. It reminds me of my early days of computing when it was more a hobby than anything else. Computing can still be fun.

Re:Memory

[Weaselmancer]

I've got a C2. I needed to run a Java app on something Raspberry Pi sized. The Pi could just barely manage it - app was unusable. It runs just fine on C2. The extra memory made a huge difference.

Re:Memory

[harrkev]

One of the advantages of the Pi is that you have a HUGE ecosystem around it. If you have a question, the odds are that somebody else has had the same one. The distros are updated fairly often, and you can get custom distros to do one specific thing (like retro emulation or media center, for example).

The problem with any non-Pi single-board computer is the lack of support.

The C-2 looks cool, but Ubuntu 16.04 (almost two years old) is the latest Linux supported. Want android? Android 5.1 (over three years old). The Ubuntu is one of the LTS versions, but we are due for a new LTS next month. Will that be ported? Who knows?

The two other Odroid boards (XU4, more powerful, C1+, less powerful) look even worse! Ubuntu 15.04 (almost three years old, and NOT an LTS version). Android 4.4 (over four years old).

If having a more recent version of your OS of choice is important, then it is hard to beat the Pi.

http://www.hardkernel.com/main...

Pi-3 for my robotics classroom

[catchblue22]

I'm setting up a small computer classroom for robotics and programming. The only thing the current Pi-3 doesn't do that I really need is to run the OnShape online CAD program (since it doesn't seem to have enough power to run WebGL properly). I'm hoping that the new version will have enough resources to run OnShape. It would mean that students could design, slice, and 3D print objects for robots, and to program those robots, all with just a Raspberry Pi. The cool thing is that the current version of the Pi-3 is powerful enough to run TensorFlow, so our robots (which use Pi-3's) can actually do camera based machine learning (we do the training on regular PC's, though it can be done rather slowly on the Pi-3).

Re:Pi-3 for my robotics classroom

[catchblue22]

Any PI would be substantially limited (by cost, power and size) to be a reasonable CAD workstation.

I don't think you understand what OnShape is. It is web based CAD created by some of the original developers of SolidWorks. It runs almost entirely in the cloud. It can be run on phones, iPad's or old crappy computers. And it is arguably better than SolidWorks. Some universities are literally considering dropping SolidWorks for OnShape because it is so easy to support. All it needs is a browser that can run WebGL. I've been running it with old Core 2 Duo's with crap low end video cards, and it runs perfectly well. There are no typical CAD workstation requirements because most of the computation is being done off site. So, if the new raspberry Pi 3b+ is capable of running WebGL, then then it most definitely COULD be a CAD workstation.

Re:Pi-3 for my robotics classroom

[4wdloop]

>> I don't think you understand what OnShape [onshape.com] is.

OnShape as well as many other Web-based CADs (did you try the TinkerCad?) use client-side rendering (projecting a 3D object into 2D screen surface). That is, the client's (here the PI or whatever your students are using locally) CPU/GPU is processing a 3D instructions of WebGl and plotting it to the 2D screen - a lot of floating point math involved.

WebGl (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) is client-side rendering functionality.

RPi has a 'decent' GPU (measured by cost and power) but it is limited, esp with respect to the memory size and number of FLOPs and likely memory bandwidth. Usually, CAD models are complicated enough to demand more resources. All in all you are going to make the students suffer through a sluggish process.

>> It runs almost entirely in the cloud.

If it did it would not need WebGl. The cloud would render the 3D into a 'picture' surface and serve it back to client. I do not think this is how it works. All in all it would make the UI rather sluggish as the round-trip latency would be remarkable.

Re:The one feature missing ...

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're looking for is an espressobin. 3xGbE ports and a mini-PCIe connector a separate wifi card, though a decent USB dongle may work just as well. It can run multiple linux distros, including OpenWRT and Ubuntu.

OOO vs in-order

[Misagon]

What I found the most interesting in these benchmarks however is how much faster the Asus Tinkerboard is.
It also has four ARM cores and clocked at 1.8 GHz (a third faster) but is several times faster than the Raspberry Pi B+ in some CPU benchmarks. The difference is that the Tinkerboard's CPU cores are running out-of-order while the Raspberry Pi B+'s A53 cores run in-order.

Other than that, the A53 is capable of running 64-bit ARM code which is supposed to be faster than the corresponding 32-bit code.
These tests were run on Raspbian however, which does still not have support for 64-bit code.

Re:OOO vs in-order

[youngone]

The big deal about R-Pi is the community and the level of support.

Exactly. I purchased a RPi 3B+ on Friday and set it up with a HiFiBerry DAC + and a 7" touchscreen, then installed Volumio and plugged in a good set of powered speakers.
It runs significantly faster than the old RPi B I had been using, and I am extremely happy, as I now have a nice sounding very small music box that is easy to use.
One issue I am having is that I see the yellow "lightening bolt" that shows the power supply is not quite up to the job. It seems to come on and off occasionally without impacting performance, so maybe I shouldn't worry, but if anyone can point me to a better supply than this one I would be grateful.
I have tried several other SBC type devices, and unless they're X86 or X64 they're significantly worse than RPi just because of the great support RPi has.

Re:OOO vs in-order

[Walter White]

Make sure you use a beefy power cable as well. I find that some wall worts (wall warts?) work OK with some cables but not with others.

I2C still broken ?

[stooo]

Is the I2C still broken ? can it now communicate with AVRs and other slower peripherials ??
https://github.com/raspberrypi...