Raspberry PI 3 is here!

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.