How the Raspberry Pi 3 Compares to Older Models
The Raspberry Pi 3 was released this week, and while the built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are a big topic of conversation, it still gets a small jump in speed. So let’s see how much faster it is by comparing it to the Pi 2 and Model B +.
For the sake of simplicity, we’ve decided to stick with a small number of very simple benchmarks here: memory benchmark, processor benchmark, and then boot time. All Raspberry Pi models compared here run at standard speed and are not overclocked. Since this is the first thing you’ll notice when loading, let’s start by looking at loading times.
Unsurprisingly, the Raspberry Pi 2 and Pi 3 boot faster. The Raspberry Pi is 3 inches ahead of the Pi 2 by about a second (17 seconds instead of 18.4). This is a slight unevenness, but nevertheless it deserves attention. Let’s take a look at the jumps in processor speed.
To get these numbers, we ran SysBench to calculate primes. This is a good general CPU benchmark and gives us a general idea of the Pi’s speed. The Raspberry Pi 2 and Pi 3 have quad-core processors, so we calculated using both one core and all four. B + only has one core, so we could only test with one. As you can see from the graph, the Raspberry Pi 3 is almost three times faster than the B + with one core, and about 60% faster than the Pi 2. The same is true when using all four cores from which the Pi 3. comes out. an increase of 60% over Pi 2.
For most of us, this is probably most noticeable in Raspbian. The Pi 2 finally made Raspbian feel fast enough to be used like a real computer, and the Pi 3 continues that trend. This also means that you should be able to work things like RetroPie’s Playstation emulator on the Pi 3 without the need for overclocking.
Again, we are using SysBench here. This time we are testing the memory load. Basically, SysBench allocates a memory buffer, then checks the read and write speed. In percentage terms, the Pi 3 outperforms in performance by a wide margin, but the amount of time we’re working with here is short enough, you probably won’t notice much difference when testing in the real world.
Of course, this is a pretty short summary. There are many other tests to check for other factors. Hack a Day launched a group that showed similar results for 3D rendering, Python, and more. Basically, the Raspberry Pi 3 performs about 40-60% faster than the Pi 2 in most tests.