Raspberry Pi OS 32-bit vs. 64-bit Performance

Last week marked the long awaited release of a 64-bit spin of Raspberry Pi OS. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has now made available a 64-bit build of their default Linux OS build derived from Debian for all recent Raspberry Pi hardware supporting AArch64. For those curious, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance improvement by switching from Raspberry Pi OS 32-bit to 64-bit.

Using a Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard computer with 4GB of RAM, I ran some fresh benchmarks of Raspberry Pi OS in its default 32-bit build and then again with the new 64-bit build.

Raspbian/Debian 11 (the 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS is now identified as Debian 11 rather than as the Raspbian 11 downstream) with Linux 5.10 was used across testing as were the other same package versions with simply switching from the latest Raspberry Pi OS 32-bit to a new install with Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit.

From there it was off to the benchmark races to see how much faster Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit is over their long-used 32-bit version that was to offer compatibility with older 32-bit only Raspberry Pi single board computers that also had rather small amounts of RAM.

The Raspberry Pi 3 and newer (and Raspberry Pi Zero 2) are 64-bit capable while the original Raspberry Pi Zero and Raspberry Pi 2 and older were limited to armhf/arm6hf.