Raspberry Pi Drag Race: Pi 1 to Pi 5 – Performance Comparison

I've got a brute force solver for the NYT Pips game. There's a particular puzzle that it takes 45.2 seconds on on my M2 Max Mac Studio. The solver is single threaded and doesn't use much memory so it is mostly limited by CPU and memory speed.

I ran it on my Pi 3, 4, 5, Intel iMac, and on my cheap Amazon Lightsail instance. Here are the results, in seconds:

  680.4  RPi 3
  274.5  RPi 4
  131.3  RPi 5
  108.5  Lightsail
   78.7  2017 iMac (3.4 GHz Intel Core i5)
   45.2  M2 Max Mac Studio

I think the Pi 3 range is a sweet spot for low cost, low power draw, decent-enough CPU. Newer models draw increasingly more power; going from 1.4W to 2.8W may not seem like much, but that's half your battery life. There's a few differences in Raspberry Pi 3 versions that may lead you to buy one or the other:

- The Pi 3B has 10/100 Ethernet, 802.11n (single-band) WiFi, Bluetooth 4.1. Power idled at 1.4W and peaked at 3.7W.

- The Pi 3B+ removed the 10/100 Ethernet in favor of USB Ethernet (~300Mbps w/USB2.0). CPU cores were overclocked from 1.2GHz to 1.4GHz (so a heatsink is more necessary), with ~15% increase in benchmark performance. It added 802.11ac (dual band) WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2 w/BLE. Power idled at 1.9W and peaked at 5.1W. This is also the only 3-model supporting PoE (w/ extra HAT).

- The Pi 3A+ removed Ethernet and reduced USB to a single port. The RAM was reduced from 1GB to 512MB. Power idled at 1.13W and peaked at 4.1W. The A+ form factor is more compact. Overall the 3A+ is smaller, cheaper, and less power draw than the 3B+ (but not as low as the 3B).

The lowest power draw with acceptable performance is the 3B. For slightly more power draw and more CPU performance, go with 3A+. For "everything" (including PoE) the 3B+ is it.

If you want the 3A+ but don't need the video, want a smaller form factor, and half the power draw, the Pi Zero 2 W is it. Though the Pi Zero 2 W is supposed to be cheapest, due to demand it's often sold out or more expensive. The 3A+ is still cheap (~$25) and available, with the downside of the higher power draw and larger form factor.

(disabling HDMI, LEDs, Wifi, Bluetooth, etc reduces power draw more. in testing, the 3A+ drew less power than the Zero 2 W with everything disabled. all of them draw ~0.1W when powered off)

I finally found a job for my Raspberry Pi 1 Model B from 2012. It’s been sitting in a drawer for years, but about a 2 years ago added it to my Tailscale network as an exit node.

It’s a single-core 700MHz ARMv6 chip with 512MB of RAM. It's a fossil—a Pi 5 is 600x faster (according to the video). But for the 'low-bandwidth' task of routing some banking traffic or running a few changedetection watches via a Hetzner VPS (where the actual docker image runs), it’s rock solid. There’s something deeply satisfying about giving 'e-waste' a second life as a weekend project.

  * They have full sized HDMI ports 
  * They will happily run using any random old USB charger and not overheat.

Side note: that site has well over three hundred vendors listed for cookies! I thought they were generating fake outs without end but I did eventually reach the end

Got as far as the cookie request, and this is one of those without a "Reject All" option where you have to scroll through dozens of options to deselect. I went no further.

you should try running Linpack on them all (you can find the results here mixed in with other machines I own) https://web.eece.maine.edu/~vweaver/group/machines.html

When I did that on Pi3 when it first came out you could crash the system because the thermal throttling wasn't fast enough (the temp sensor was on the GPU not CPU). When I reported the issue on the pi forums the answer was essentially "why would anyone ever want to do that"

Interestingly the original Pi had the same amount of memory as the PS3 which was available at the time of the Pi release. Still amazes me how much we did with only 512MB.

Oh no, it appears to have received the hug of death?

I am interested in this, I have been using Raspberry Pis for various projects and home servers since the original - Currently one is hosting my navidrome music server, my password manager, and several other local network servers.

I feel the upgrade each time, and then get used to it, as I suppose we tend to do. I still remember the upgrade from 1 to 2 being the most impactful to me personally though. (I think maybe because that's when game emulation became viable?)

> The Pi 2 managed to open the browser and actually started playing back a 1080P video, which was surprising, but playback was terrible.

A Youtube tab, web browser modern enough for YouTube, and OS modern enough for that web browser, all fit in 1GB of memory? Wow.

Do we think this page loads enough ads?

The graphs are interesting but, really, if you’re considering your readers rather than SEOing for last decade’s search engine technology, you should lead with them and discuss the findings afterwards.

I.e., get to the point quickly and then unpack the detail.

It’s interesting seeing where the incremental vs revolutionary improvements have occurred. CPU-wise, a huge leap with the 3 and then solid but steady improvement with 4 and 5. But the most meaningful jump in GPU performance seems to be 4 -> 5, and I’d be really interested in what that maybe opens up in terms of console emulation.

Anyway, fewers ads, please. Scanning through the article on mobile felt like playing hopscotch in a minefield.

For $50 you can pick up a used mini PC with say, i5-6500T and 8GB ram, that'll be much faster than the Pi 5. And it'll be compatible with all Linux distros. Really the Pi 3 is good enough as an edge device where you want to hook up things to the GPIO pins.

The article shows how performance has always increased at a somewhat continually increasing level of inconvenience. Weird connectors, SUPER demanding power requirements, new case designs every generation, new cooling required every generation, etc.

My applications have remained the same for many years my octoprint and retropie don't require more FLOPs as time goes on but I'd really enjoy a modern board that has fewer headaches. Works on any normal USB port instead of requiring specialized power supplies, doesn't brown out and reset as much, doesn't heat up as much, etc. I suspect "a pi 3, but now with fewer headaches" would sell better than "a pi 3 but even more headaches and bigger numbers that you don't want".

I suppose its unintentional comedy that they picked a 1080p H264 video playback as the benchmark. Because of course the chip in the Raspberry Pi 1 was literally designed for that! The only thing it asks of you is that you make use of the fixed function blocks that take up much of its silicon space. So no wonder that utterly fails with modern software - we need to go all the way to RPi 5 to smother the problem with enough generic computing power to overcome the careless people that spearhead much of browser development.

[dead]

Yawn, not even test of AES encryption which is probably the biggest performance boost switching to a Pi 5.