Banana Pi Review
WiFi USB Stick Compatibility
As far as WiFi sticks I’ve had a chance to test so far, the Banana Pi tested the same as the Raspberry Pi Model B, both without a powered hub:
| USB WiFi Stick | Chipset | Model B+ | Model B | Model A | Banana Pi |
| Netis WF-2111 | Realtek ??? | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Patriot PCBOWAU2-N | Realtek RTL8191S | YES | NO | YES | NO |
| LEGUANG LG-N19 ? | Ralink rt2x00 | YES | NO | YES | NO |
| RetailPlus+ WL-6203 | Realtek RTL8191S | YES | NO | YES | NO |
| KEEBOX W150NUv1.0 | Ralink rt2x00 | NO | NO | NO | NO |
UPDATE: Since publishing this review, I’ve started my Banana Pi WiFi USB Test article which now tests eight WiFi sticks and will be updated every time I test a new WiFi stick.
Documentation & Third Party Books
The great thing about Linux is that it is a widely used, standard operating system.
Debian is one of the most popular Linux distribution, and Raspbian is based on Debian for ARM processors, providing a great deal of compatibility between the Raspberry Pi and the Banana Pi.
There is a wealth of books, magazine articles, HOWTO’s, tutorials and FAQ’s on Debian that apply equally as well to Raspbian – regardless of what hardware it is running on – as long as it does not require a specific hardware platform feature.
A fair number of the documentation and books specific to the Raspberry Pi will be useful to Banana Pi owners – except for software that requires unique Raspberry Pi features mandated by its processor, GPU or VDU.
For example, most GPIO library functions will work in the same way thanks to the efforts to port GPIO libraries, however only the software that has been adjusted (ported) for the Banana’s unique hardware will work.
Case in point, the GPIO library works, but the pigpio and servo blasters won’t work (due to differences in DMA implementations).
Benchmarks
Benchmarks that did not already average multiple results were run 2-4 times (depending on length of test) and averaged.
SysBench 0.4.12
| Benchmark | Raspberry Pi | Banana Pi | Banana Pi |
| Number of cores used | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| SysBench CPU Test (seconds) | 507 | 378 | 149 |
| SysBench Memory BW (MB/s) | 88.9 | 201.7 | 426.7 |
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.
On a per core basis (Raspberry Pi has one, Banana Pi has two) the Banana is 34% faster for CPU operations, and has more than twice the memory banwdith.
Using both cores, the Banana is more than three times faster for CPU, and has roughly five times the memory bandwidth.
iperf 2.0.5
| Benchmark | Raspberry Pi | Banana Pi | Banana Pi |
| 100Mbps | 100Mbps | 1000Mbps | |
| iperf | 47.6 | 96.4 | 530.7 |
| iperf -w 128k | 47.6 | 94.3 | 484.0 |
Results shown are in megabits per second
On a 100Mbit network, a Banana Pi has roughly twice the Ethernet throughput of a Raspberry Pi.
On a gigabit network, a Banana Pi has more than ten times as much throughput as a Raspberry Pi!
NBench 2.2.3
| Benchmark | Raspberry Pi | Banana Pi |
| Nbench Integer Index | 11.55 | 17.65 |
| Nbench Floating Point Index | 3.88 | 6.93 |
Results are an index relative to a Pentium 90 with 256KB L2 cache.
Using only a single core on the Banana has roughly 53% more integer performance, and almost twice the FPU power (178%).
Unix Bench 5.1.3
| Benchmark | Raspberry Pi | Banana Pi | Banana Pi |
| Number of cores used | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| Dhrystone | 142.7 | 247.4 | 489.8 |
| Whetstone | 48.9 | 82.6 | 177.8 |
| Hanoi | 18790.9 | 33930.2 | 67120.9 |
Results are an index relative to a SPARCstation 20-61 (rated at 10.0).
hdparm & dd
| Benchmark | Raspberry Pi | Banana Pi |
| hdparm cached reads | 159.6 | 332.7 |
| hdparm buffered reads | 19.52 | 16.65 |
| dd copying 128MB /dev/null | 146.0 | 358.3 |
| dd writing 128MB from sd image | 23.5 | 18.6 |
| dd writing 128MB from /dev/zero | 16.8 | 37.4 |
Results are in megabytes per second.
Due to 1GB of memory the Banana wins on cached disk activity, but the non-cached results favor the Raspberry Pi.
Review Index
Page 1: Introduction, Does it look the same?
Page 2: Closer Look, Feature Comparison
Page 3: Operating Systems, Software Compatibility
Page 4: WiringPi, RPi.GPIO, Hardware Compatibility
Page 5: More board compatibility test results
Page 6: USB WiFi stick Compatibility, Documentation, Benchmarks
Page 7: Power Utilization, Support, Conclusion
