Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Review
Documentation
I was surprised to find a thick “Raspberry Pi Quick Start Guide & Safety Instruction Manual” packaged with my new Pi’s. It has eight pages of introductory material in sixteen languages to help new users get started, unfortunately it does not provide a link to https://www.raspberrypi.org, https://www.raspberrypi.org/help/ or https://www.raspberrypi.org/resources/ … not to mention the excellent community forums at https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/
Of course there are a lot of Raspbian, Raspberry Pi, and Debian books out there.
Benchmarks
Booting & Launching Apps
System boot times and application launch times are very important metrics to users, as they are a measure of how “snappy” a system is.
| Launch Times | media | Start | Web 1 | Web 2 | Shell 1 | Shell 2 | File 1 | File 2 |
| Raspberry Pi B+ | ADATA | 42 | 15 | 12 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 2 |
| Raspberry Pi 2 B | ADATA | 22.9 | 8.2 | 2.5 | 1 | 0.5 | 1 | 0.5 |
| MIPS CI20 | eMMC | 115 | 25 | 9 | 4 | 2 | 7 | 2 |
| Banana Pro | ADATA | 35 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0.5 | 1 | 0.5 |
| ODROID-C1 | ADATA | 36.9 | 11.5 | 6.8 | 1.3 | 0.9 | 1.8 | 0.9 |
| ODROID-C1 | ADATA UHS | 35.4 | 9.4 | 6.9 | 1.2 | 0.9 | 1.6 | 0.8 |
| ODROID-C1 | EeMMC | 25.4 | 8.9 | 6.7 | 1.1 | 1.1 | 1.1 | 0.7 |
The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B does extremely well – it boots ~10% faster than the ODROID C1 boots with an eMMC module.
Surprisingly, the dual core Banana Pro has the fastest application launch times.
Of course, the different boards tend to use different web and file browsers, which influences the results.
Compiling GNU Emacs 24.4
I decided to add a real-world large project compilation in order to show the effect of multiple cores on compiling large software projects.
In order to see how the new Pi does, I went back and re-tested some of the other boards for comparison.
| Make | -j 1 | -j 2 | -j 4 | -j 6 | -j 8 |
| Banana Pro | 1189.6 | 724.1 | 722.4 | 729.9 | 739.7 |
| ODROID C1 ADATA | 790.6 | 512.3 | 385.4 | 384.4 | 391.0 |
| ODROID-C1 eMMC | 762.0 | 471.7 | 382.6 | 375.6 | 366.6 |
| MIPS Create CI20 | 1459.5 | 899.5 | 922.8 | 923.0 | 920.4 |
| Raspberry Pi Model B+ | 2770.2 | 2794.7 | 2787.0 | 2771.5 | 2765.9 |
| Raspberry Pi 2 Model B | 933.3 | 575.9 | 403.8 | 409.2 | 408.4 |
I thought a chart would help visualize the difference in compilation times:
(click on chart for a larger version)
Do I really have to comment on how much faster the new Pi 2 is???
The ODROID C1 does extremely well, usually slightly beating the P2.
SysBench 0.4.12
| Sysbench | # Cores | CPU (sec) | Mem (MB/sec) |
| Raspberry Pi B+ | 1 | 507.0 | 88.9 |
| Raspberry Pi 2B | 1 | 295.3 | 174.4 |
| Raspberry Pi 2B | 2 | 149.9 | 348.5 |
| Raspberry Pi 2B | 4 | 74.7 | 648.5 |
| Banana Pro | 1 | 291.6 | 222.4 |
| Banana Pro | 2 | 147.6 | 422.3 |
| MIPS CI20 | 1 | 138.8 | 174.7 |
| MIPS CI20 | 2 | 69.2 | 237.0 |
| C1 | 1 | 212.8 | 288.3 |
| C1 | 2 | 110.1 | 554.5 |
| C1 | 4 | 57.9 | 998.3 |
Sysbench CPU results show total execution time in seconds for the same amount of work, which is why the CPU dual threaded results show twice the time on the single core Raspberry Pi, and half on the dual core Banana Pi.
The best Sysbench single and dual core CPU performance was from the MIPS CI20, followed by the ODROID-C1. The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B’s CPU score was neck to neck with the Banana Pro. The quad core C1 had the best CPU result.
The highest memory bandwidth was obtained by the ODROID-C1, followed by the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B.
iperf 2.0.5
| iPerf | Type | iperf | iperf -w 128k |
| Raspberry Pi B+ | 100Mbps | 47.6 | 47.6 |
| Raspberry Pi 2B | 100Mbps | 94.2 | 94.2 |
| Raspberry Pi 2B | USB GigE | 178.0 | 176.0 |
| Banana Pro | 100Mbps | 96.4 | 94.4 |
| Banana Pro | 1000Mbps | 653.0 | 487.0 |
| Banana Pro | WiFi | 30.1 | 28.1 |
| MIPS CI20 | 100Mbps | 27.5 | 27.7 |
| MIPS CI20 | WiFi | 0.8 | 0.8 |
| ODROID-C1 | 100Mbps | 83.7 | 83.7 |
| ODROID-C1 | 1000Mbps | 386.0 | 355.0 |
Results shown are in megabits per second
The new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B almost doubles its Ethernet performance compared to its predecessors!
The Gigabit equipped Banana Pro and ODROID C1 get much better results, and would get even better results if tuned.
I had a Linksys USB3.0 Gigabit Ethernet adapter handy, so I tried it with the new Pi – and obtained a decent speedup!
NBench 2.2.3
| nbench | Integer | FP |
| Raspberry Pi B+ | 11.55 | 3.88 |
| Raspberry Pi 2B | 19.80 | 8.49 |
| MIPS CI20 | 18.08 | 3.88 |
| Banana Pro | 20.23 | 8.67 |
| ODROID-C1 | 30.20 | 10.50 |
Results are an index relative to a Pentium 90 with 256KB L2 cache.
These single core results are quite interesting, with the ODROID C1 dominating the field.
Article Index
