Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Benchmarks - Nice For $15

[torsionbar28]

Does anybody know to which Intel CPU the original RPI Zero compare ?
Is it 486 or better ?

Why don't you run a few benchmarks and tell us.

[torsionbar28]

Yeah, a $15 board using the 9 year old A53 at just 1GHz giving U74 a hard time is not exactly a great selling point for RISC-V... While optimizations are always possible, the same applies to Arm (eg. this board runs 32-bit code, while 64-bit is 10-15% faster). And RISC-V has issues that cannot be worked around in the compiler (such as no conditional execution, load/store with indexing or writeback).

Risc-V has some promising industrial applications, but nothing in the consumer space that would compete with Rpi sku's. Not in the foreseeable future anyways. From a consumer standpoint, Risc-V is little more than an academic curiosity.

[monkeynut]

Would have been nice to have a metal heatspreader to keep temps down, so you could essentially completely supplant the Pi 3+ in performance. But at the money you can't really complain.

[Raka555]

Why don't you run a few benchmarks and tell us.

I would gladly have, but I don't have x86 hardware that are old enough.
My oldest machine is a Core2-duo E6600 and it blows a PI Zero-1 right out of the water.

[Raka555]

There isn't really a direct x86 equivalent. Performance would be similar to a 400MHz Pentium II. The 486 only did 100MHz but would need to be clocked well above 1GHz to achieve similar performance.

I regret giving away my Celeron 300A (clocked at 450) all those years ago. It would have been a nice comparison.
128 MB RAM
I1st gen Nvidia TNT GPU (16MB).

That machine was soo amazing when I got it, but the software soon started to go backwards.

[kylew77]

I regret giving away my Celeron 300A (clocked at 450) all those years ago. It would have been a nice comparison.
128 MB RAM
I1st gen Nvidia TNT GPU (16MB).

That machine was soo amazing when I got it, but the software soon started to go backwards.

Dang that was a sweet machine! I didn't have a machine with 128MB of RAM until my first Pentium 4. Used that sucker all the way up through college in 2013 with maxed out memory at 2GB going from 128MB to 256MB to 512MB to 1GB to 2GB. Funny, you could still buy 2GB netbooks and Chromebooks until just a few years ago and nowadays 4GB feels inadequate for simple web browsing.

[Raka555]

I would gladly have, but I don't have x86 hardware that are old enough.
My oldest machine is a Core2-duo E6600 and it blows a PI Zero-1 right out of the water.

Just did a quick test.

single threaded performance.
E6600: Total Measured: 280.11 ms
RPI400: Total Measured: 477.02 ms
Ryzen 3700x: Total Measured: 82.57 ms
RPI Zero-1:Total Measured: 3370.83 ms


With a quick compile test, the E6600 was also about double the performance of the RPI400, but the time is dominated by the final linking, which is single threaded.
E6600:
time make -j2
real 0m16.575s
user 0m15.600s
sys 0m1.816s

RPI400:
time make -j4
real 0m29.551s
user 0m27.457s
sys 0m4.081s

Ryzen 3700x:
time make -j16
real 0m3.113s
user 0m3.152s
sys 0m0.313s

RPI Zero-1:
time make
real 4m12.987s
user 3m15.891s
sys 0m13.104s

[baka0815]

I'm planning on building a NAS - does anyone have any tips on the CPU to use? Can I go with a Pi4? Should I use something different? Do I need a "real" x86-CPU?

[Raka555]

I'm planning on building a NAS - does anyone have any tips on the CPU to use? Can I go with a Pi4? Should I use something different? Do I need a "real" x86-CPU?

It depends on what is important to you. Mostly about power usage vs performance.

In general the x86 machines makes a faster NAS, but the RPIs draw a lot less power, but has a lot less performance.
Also you have to think about the power for the hard drive. RPIs kind of struggle with power delivery as it is, so if you are going to use an HDD, then it would be better to use one with its own power or a powered USB hub.

I use one of these, but it is pretty slow: http://www.cubietech.com/product-detail/cubieboard2/

[kneekoo]

Nice, if you have nothing better to do with your money, and you also like industrial junk. There's zero practical use case for this device.

It's a computer, it can do a lot of things, it has very low power usage. It's great for many practical use cases. But of course it's not for everyone, just as computers in general are not for everyone.