Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Review
Benchmarks
I run a mix of real-world and synthetic benchmarks for my reviews, concentrating on what users would experience out of the box with the suggested operating system for the tested boards.
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.
Times are measured with a stop watch.
Different boards tend to use different web and file browsers – which influences the results – and the boot time is influenced by the different kernels and speed of the boot device.
As you can see the Raspberry Pi 3 does extremely well for these tests.
Start: time from applying power to stable desktop
Web1: time it takes default web browser to fully open for the first time after booting and stop rendering
Web2: time it takes default web browser to re-open after being closed
Shell1: time it takes for default terminal to open for the first time after booting
Shell2: time it takes for default terminal to re-open after being closed
File1: time it takes default file browser to fully open for the first time after booting and stop rendering
File2: time it takes default file browser to re-open after being closed
Compiling GNU Emacs
Here is a real-world large project compilation in order to show the effect of multiple cores on compiling large software projects.
The chart below clearly shows the difference parallel compilation can make:
(click on chart for larger version)
Lower numbers are better – results are in seconds for compiling Emacs without X.
SysBench 0.4.12
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 SysBench memory benchmark with the default values gave lower than expected results in early testing.
I’ve switched to 1MB block size and 10GB total size for the memory test – so you will see some default/old results that are too low, and some new results above.
The Raspberry Pi 3 does extremely well – only the eight core ODROID XU4 beats it for the CPU test!
Article Index
- Introducing Raspberry Pi 3
- A Closer Look at Raspberry Pi 3
- Feature Comparison, Operating Systems
- Software Compatibility, Common Applications, Multimedia, Kodi
- Hardware Compatibility, Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth
- GPIO: WiringPi, pigpio, Add-On Board testing
- More testing: RoboPi, Pi Droid Alpha, SchoolBoard ][
- More testing: Pi Rtc Dio, Pi Jumper, EZasPi
- Benchmarks: Booting & Launching Apps, Compiling GNU Emacs
- More Benchmarks: iperf client & server, NBench, Unix Bench, hdparm, dd
- Power Utilization, Documentation, Support, Conclusion
