As part of a recent Raspberry Pi project on Upwork, I obtained a Pi for local testing. Model 3 B, with the 1.2 Ghz quad-core Arm CPU. I was curious to see how the raw speed of the CPU compared with my desktop 3.2 Ghz AMD processor.
Simple benchmarking tests with a few Python commands revealed that the Arm CPU is about one seventh the speed of the AMD, equivalent to about 450 Mhz of the latter.
Some tests on the Arm:
$ python -m timeit 'abs(3.15)'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.402 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit 'len([1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9])'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 1.18 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit 'min(1,3.15)'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 1.1 usec per loop
Same tests on the AMD:
$ python -m timeit 'abs(3.15)'
10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.0574 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit 'len([1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9])'
10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.179 usec per loop
$ python -m timeit 'min(1,3.15)'
10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.171 usec per loop
I had hoped for better than this, about 600 Mhz equivalent, half the actual 1.2 Ghz of the Arm. But it’s not too bad and the Pi can serve as a “background” machine for more I/O heavy tasks.