Benchmarking The $25 Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ Performance

For getting an initial look at the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ performance, I benchmarked it against the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, ASUS Tinker Board, Firefly ROC-RK3328-CC, and ODROID-C2. A larger ARM SBC benchmark comparison will come soon on Phoronix with the latest ARM Linux images. For this Raspberry Pi 3A+ benchmarking it was just testing the few boards for an initial comparison.

The Raspberry Pi boards were running with Raspbian 9.6 on its Linux 4.14.79 kernel with LXDE desktop environment and GCC 6.3.0 compiler. All of the benchmarks were facilitated using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.

The LPDDR2 memory performance of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ was right in line with the other Raspberry Pi 3 boards and their LPDDR2 memory. At least the next Raspberry Pi board will have to move past DDR2 memory and hopefully have at least 2GB RAM... The ASUS Tinker Board and ODROID-C2 show how the memory performance can be much better.

The Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ performance was coming in line with the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ benchmarks as would be expected considering the same Broadcom SoC. In a few tests the 3A+ was even slightly faster, perhaps due to any thermal management or manufacturing/stepping improvements.

Of the small selection of ARM boards tested for this comparison, the ASUS Tinker Board and ODROID-C2 are much faster than the current Raspberry Pi boards.