Tag Archives: benchmarks

Raspberry Pi – Benchmarking 1.0 vs. 2.0

Standard | Posted on by

The Raspberry Pi is awesome. Given the unit’s price, expandability, and functionality it is a great value. The Raspberry Pi has two models – “A” and “B” with a few functional differences. The “B” model was released first and includes features like ethernet. Newer versions of the “B” model have more RAM; I wondered how this may impact the benchmarked performance figures.

Model “B” – 1.0

There are two versions of the “B” model – 1.0 and 2.0. The original version (1.0) included 256MB of ram; the newer version (2.0) includes 512MB of RAM. I have previously benchmarked the 1.0 version of the “B” model using the nbench Linux tool and compared it to AWS using the Photonix Test Suite with the pts/nginx test.
Continue reading →

Raspberry Pi vs. AWS, v2.0

Standard | Posted on by

Earlier this year I ran a few tests comparing a Raspberry Pi (rev 1.0) to an Amazon AWS Micro instance. There were a few interesting and insightful comments in response to the post. I want to run through a few of the open comments and questions in a second post.

What about an AWS small instance?

The most common piece of feedback I received was that I should have used a small AWS instance. I know AWS well (I work for Amazon) and I know the micro instances are capped. I chose a micro instance based on the price. Let’s compare a small and micro instance.
Continue reading →

Raspberry Pi Overclocking Benchmarks

Standard | Posted on by

Over-clocking a Raspberry Pi?

The Raspberry Pi is an amazing device for $35. I have been tinkering with mine for a few weeks. Recently, the Raspberry Pi group offered directions for over-clocking a Raspberry Pi from its stock CPU frequency of 700 MHz to a “turbo” mode of 1000 MHz. Even better, they have guaranteed that using the “turbo” mode will not void your warranty or damage the Raspberry Pi.

The question I had was – what would the impact be of this overclocking? Therefore, I decided to test the CPU under a number of frequencies from the stock setting of 700 MHz through the “turbo” mode of 1000 MHz. I used the nbench Linux tool to benchmark my Raspberry Pi’s CPU. I changed the CPU frequency via the raspi-config command-line utility.

The results

The following table shows the CPU frequency of my Raspberry Pi and the “integer index” and “floating-point index” calculated by nbench. Higher values are better.

CPU (MHz) Integer index Floating-point index
700 10.752 3.474
800 13.024 4.244
900 14.475 4.653
950 14.575 4.501
1000 16.237 5.475

As the table shows, the difference from the stock speed of 700 MHz to 1000 MHz is substantial. This chart shows the steps visually.

Raspberry Pi Over-clocking Results

What is of special interest to me are the actual performance gains over stock, over the previous level, and the performance per dollar of acquisition costs.

Performance improvements over stock

CPU (MHz) Int improvement (%) FP improvement (%)
700 100 100
800 121 122
900 135 134
950 136 130
1000 151 158

Performance improvements over previous speed

CPU (MHz) Int improvement (%) FP improvement (%)
700 100 100
800 121 122
900 111 110
950 101 97
1000 111 122

Performance index per dollar

This table breaks down the performance per dollar of the Raspberry Pi’s cost.

CPU (MHz) Cost per Int ($) Cost per FP ($)
700 3.26 10.07
800 2.69 8.25
900 2.42 7.52
950 2.40 7.78
1000 2.16 6.39

Conclusions

These benchmarks allow me to draw a few key conclusions.

First, my benchmark results are close (but not identical to) the results from the Raspberry Pi foundation. Therefore, some variability likely explains different results. I used a stock install so I am not sure what they did (or did not do) to achieve higher benchmarks.

Second, the “turbo” mode makes a huge difference! My Raspberry Pi is getting 151% integer performance and 158% floating-point performance over stock. Those are some astounding numbers for a software tweak that is vendor-supported (and endorsed!)

Third, If you do not want to take a risk (some SD card corruption has been reported with the 1000 MHz setting) than using 900 MHz offers the nearly the same performance as the 950 MHz setting. This slower speed may offer more “safety” with a little impact.

Testing notes

To run these tests I disabled wpa_supplicant and transmission-daemon which consistently negatively impacted the nbench results about 3.4%.

It’s over 11000!

Standard | Posted on by

Last year I wrote a post comparing the benchmarks of my then-new (2011) MacbookPro against some of the previous Apple computers I had owned. While this is a side story, I recently decided to turn in my Lenovo Windows 7-based laptop at work and repurpose my 2011 MacBook Pro as my work computer. To summarize that decision, I really wanted a computer that worked and was annoyed with the $400 calculator my employer issued me (fodder for another post, later.) The important point is that I decided to continue my lust adoration of Apple products for another year and just recently purchased a base MacBook Pro Retina for my personal computer.

Therefore, I present you the benchmarks 2012 edition!

Ready for some exciting numbers? Ok! :) These numbers were all generated via the Geekbench tool (32-bit).

Last year’s MBP model (which had an Intel SSD installed) scored 10,135 while this year’s Retina MBP model scored 11,050.

This table summarizes the benchmarks for all of my previous MacBook laptops including my newest edition.

Screen-Shot-2012-06-28-at-4.35.38-AM

This graph shows the Geekbench scores of all models over time.

Untitled

Edit

I decoded to benchmark my iPad 3 with Geekbench after writing this post. It scored 754.

Thoughts

First and foremost, the Geekbench score is a little misleading.

I am not an Apple apologist but most of the benefits (technologically speaking) are likely not reflected in the Geekbench score. Display aside, I am pretty sure Geekbench does not measure GPU performance, for instance, which is likely much better with the 2012 model. While the retina MBP feels about the “same” speed-wise the GPU performance seems to be much improved when the resolution is held constant over time.

Second, the screen is amazing**

The retina display on a laptop is quite amazing – it’s like mixing a top-of-the-line 2000 CRT display and a laptop all in one. While the overall brightness is a bit weak sometimes, the display is simply beautiful.

** That is, of course, until you run into most websites and applications which look like they are being served through your 14.4k CompuServe modem. It will be interesting to see how we adapt to super high-res displays, websites especially. Even Apple’s own website has a ton of “non-retina” images which leaves their website looking like… well, crap.

Goodbye, CD
The battery in this new Retina MBP is amazing; I do not lament the loss of my CD drive at all.

Kindle Fire Benchmarks – stock vs. CM7

Standard | Posted on by

Since ripping apart my Fire, literally, I was interested in comparing the performance of my Fire running CyanogenMod 7 versus the Kindle flavor of Android. To get a rough idea I used Quadrant Standard from the Google Market. Here are the results:

  • Stock Kindle Fire OS (6.2.1) – 1,951
  • CyanogenMod 7 (7.2.0-RC0) – 2,819

Continue reading →