Some days ago the Raspberry PI 3 arrived home as I had ordered one when I heard of its launch. It's certainly a faster PI than the PI 2 due to the ARM Cortex-A53 cores. More or less the +50% performance ratio is true, depending on the application of course. There are some other additions as well like WiFi and bluetooth.
 |
| The Raspberry PI 3 |
 |
| A closer look of the PI 3 |
As usual, I am providing some nbench execution results. These are consistent with the +50% performance claim. For those interested I had published nbench results on the PI 2 in the past.
BYTEmark* Native Mode Benchmark ver. 2 (10/95)
Index-split by Andrew D. Balsa (11/97)
Linux/Unix* port by Uwe F. Mayer (12/96,11/97)
TEST : Iterations/sec. : Old Index : New Index
: : Pentium 90* : AMD K6/233*
--------------------:------------------:-------------:------------
NUMERIC SORT : 654.04 : 16.77 : 5.51
STRING SORT : 72.459 : 32.38 : 5.01
BITFIELD : 1.9972e+08 : 34.26 : 7.16
FP EMULATION : 134.28 : 64.44 : 14.87
FOURIER : 6677.3 : 7.59 : 4.27
ASSIGNMENT : 10.381 : 39.50 : 10.25
IDEA : 2740.7 : 41.92 : 12.45
HUFFMAN : 1008.9 : 27.98 : 8.93
NEURAL NET : 9.8057 : 15.75 : 6.63
LU DECOMPOSITION : 365.38 : 18.93 : 13.67
==========================ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS==========================
INTEGER INDEX : 34.272
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 13.131
Baseline (MSDOS*) : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
CPU : 4 CPU ARMv7 Processor rev 4 (v7l)
L2 Cache :
OS : Linux 4.1.18-v7+
C compiler : gcc-4.9
libc : libc-2.19.so
MEMORY INDEX : 7.162
INTEGER INDEX : 9.769
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 7.283
Baseline (LINUX) : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38
* Trademarks are property of their respective holder.
As I crossed some reports on temperature issues of PI 3 I wanted to execute some experiments on power consumption of the PI 3. I used a power meter on which I plugged the power supply unit feeding the PI. I run a few experiments and I got the following power consumption ratings:
| PI running state | Power consumption |
|---|---|
| Idle | 1.4W |
| Single threaded benchmark | 2.2W |
| Multithreaded benchmark | 4.0W |
| After running "poweroff" | 0.5W |
So, for my case it doesn't seem consume to much power. However, a comparison with the PI 2 should be performed in order to have a better picture.
