Performance: Benchmarks

At the heart of the Raspberry Pi lies a Broadcom BCM2835 system on a chip. A system on a chip is an integrated circuit that integrates all components of a computer or other electronic system into a single chip. This system on a chip runs at a clock speed of 700MHz and is based on an ARM11 processor. The Raspberry Pi is therefore unable to run x86 operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows or Ubuntu. Instead, it runs on specially compiled versions of Debian or Fedora.

With a smartphone-class processor running at 700MHz and 256MB of RAM (some of which is allocated to the graphics) it is not surprising that performance is easily surpassed by any modern Intel or AMD processor. According to the Raspberry Pi Foundation the Pi's performance is similar to a 300MHz Pentium II, a processor released way back in 1997.

Whenever I lay my hands on a new computer, inevitably at some point I feel inclined to run some benchmarks. Not wishing to spend too much time on running then, as they really miss the point of the Raspberry Pi, I confined tests to the benchmarks offered by HardInfo, a system information and benchmark tool, and GtkPerf, an application designed to test GTK+ performance from a variety of different GTK operations. The tests were performed on the unofficial Raspbian "Pisces" image.

HardInfo

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HardInfo acts both as a system profiler and benchmark. Here are the results of HardInfo's benchmarks.

For all of the tests above with the exception of CPU Cryptohash, lower figures are better.

GtkPerf

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Next Page: Software

1. Introduction
2. Distributions
3. Benchmarks
4. Software
5. Things to Do with the Raspberry Pi
6. Summary

Last Updated Sunday, June 03 2012 @ 07:35 PM EDT