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

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

#61

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

tzs wrote: post #30
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #23

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…

> 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. Is that with the same load? The chart in the article shows a Pi 3 and Pi 4 using the same idle power, with the 4 drawing more under full load. But the 4 can do more at full load, raising the question of w…

The author's chart is incorrect. He has the idle power at "1" for the Pi 2, "2" for the Pi 1/3/4, and "3" for the Pi 5. No other published power draw numbers are whole numbers like this, they are floating points, like 1.2, 1.9, etc. Google around and you'll find several different power testing comparisons with more detail.

Most reports show the Pi 4 drawing ~2.8 W in idle headless mode, and the Pi 3B+ drawing ~1.9-2.0 W in idle headless mode. With full load the Pi 4 draws more (6.4W, to the Pi 3B+'s 5.1W) with the same test procedure.

But you do have to check the testing method; enabling/disabling hardware features changes the figure, and each additional USB peripheral draws more power. Otoh, to get a "max power draw" reading you have to enable everything and stress all CPUs at once, and then it will dip under thermal load.

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

#62

Post by zahlman »

Freedom2 wrote: post #60
zahlman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see no cookie request using NoScript.

I do - perhaps something is misconfigured on your end?

I'd say my browser is doing exactly what I want it to do here. The third-party cookies are being rejected off the top by my browser settings; there's no annoying cookie consent dialog because the JS for it isn't running; and the site is still readable.

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

#63

Post by tzs »

tomcam wrote: post #52
tzs wrote: post #43

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…

Very cool. I feel like Lightsail performed quite well. Feels like a local optimum of some kind. Mind specifying the tier?

It says "512 MB RAM, 1 vCPU, 20 GV SSD" and "General Purpose". It was whatever was the cheapest when I made it.

Looking at the instance creation page it looks like it is no longer available. The cheapest now has 2 vCPU and the same other specs.

If anyone would like to run it on something else for comparison I've put it Pastebin [1].

Normally, a script converts the puzzle into a header file that describes the puzzle in terms of the data structures the solver uses, and then the solver is compiled with that header included via #include, but for benchmarking I manually included the header, so it is just a single C file that you simply compile and run. Add a -q flag to have it just find and count the solutions but not display them. For this particular puzzle it is fine to let it show the solutions. For some puzzles with a ton of solutions it displaying them can take significant time.

If anyone actually wants a Pips solver to solve Pips puzzles, there's a copy of mine along with the scripts that convert puzzles from the JSON format the NYT provides for download to the header file for the solver and some other stuff as a shar archive on Pastebin [2]. Pastebin's download link messes up something with that, so click the raw link and copy/paste from the browser.

Note: I'm still doing a lot of experimenting with it, both in the solving algorithm and in how the display the results, and am not at a point where I'm able to accept outside contributions. There are other Pips solvers that have been put on Github (and even posted on HN) that are (1) more sophisticated than mine, and (2) almost certainly more open to contributions. Just use mine if for some reason you want a fairly simple (aside from the damn display stuff...) brute force solver in C and aren't going to expect anything else from me :-)

[1] https://pastebin.com/5HmymPXw

[2] https://pastebin.com/SfSk3eNB

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

#64

Post by MBCook »

tzs wrote: post #30
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #23

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…

> 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. Is that with the same load? The chart in the article shows a Pi 3 and Pi 4 using the same idle power, with the 4 drawing more under full load. But the 4 can do more at full load, raising the question of w…

Right. In CPU scheduling this is the “race to idle” idea.

Sometimes it’s more efficient to run a task at full CPU power for 25ms than low (non-idle) CPU power 100ms.

It wouldn’t surprise me too much if the 4 could run the 3’s full load in less power than the 3 does.

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

#65

Post by MBCook »

jsheard wrote: post #59
cmovq wrote: post #48

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.

And you didn't even get the luxury of unified memory on the PS3 - the CPU and GPU had separate 256MB chunks. I can still barely believe they got Grand Theft Auto 5 running on that thing.

I think it’s more amazing it’s the latest GTA not only had been V for 3 console generations, but it’s still selling well.

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

#66

Post by MBCook »

encom wrote: post #51
zahlman wrote: post #40

> 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.

Worth noting: A Pi 1 will decode 1080p h264 video flawlessly. I used one as a media center for a long time, running OpenELEC (now LibreELEC). Moving around the UI was a bit sluggish, but video playback was smooth. YouTube is an absolute clown show. It's so bad that I'm certain Google devs are actively making it terrible on purpose. I use Newpipe on an older (but not that old) tablet. Whenever Google breaks Newpipe an…

Are they even pushing H264 to the pi? Or is this more of their “you’ll take WebP and like it” stuff.

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

#67

Post by varispeed »

zikduruqe wrote: post #29
verginer wrote: post #12

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…

As a fun weekend project in 2013, I stood up a weather station using Weewx and my RPI 2 with 1 GB RAM. I told myself if it ever crashes or the SD card gets corrupted, I'll just tear everything down. Well, it's still running today on the original SD card. At noon today it processed its 1,055,425th record in the database. Still, if it ever crashes, I'll just tear it down. :)

Sounds like you want it to crash really badly :)

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

#68

Post by mooracle »

Pi 5 pricing gets harder to justify when you add up the extras. 8GB board + active cooler + good SD card + case + power supply = $150+ easily.

Used 1L mini PCs (EliteDesk, ThinkCentre Tiny, etc.) with i5-8400T/8GB/256GB go for $50-100 on eBay. You get x86 compatibility, NVMe support, real Ethernet, and no thermal throttling. Running an EliteDesk 800 G4 with 2.5GbE adapter and 2x2TB NVMe for home server duties. Draws ~15W idle, handles everything I threw at it. The Pi would need USB adapters for any of that. Pi still wins for GPIO projects and actual embedded use. But for "small Linux box" use cases, the used business mini PC market is tough to beat.

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

#69

Post by tzs »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #61
tzs wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Is that with the same load? The chart in the article shows a Pi 3 and Pi 4 using the same idle power, with the 4 drawing more under full load. But the 4 can do more at full load, raising the question of w…

The author's chart is incorrect. He has the idle power at "1" for the Pi 2, "2" for the Pi 1/3/4, and "3" for the Pi 5. No other published power draw numbers are whole numbers like this, they are floating points, like 1.2, 1.9, etc. Google around and you'll find several different power testing comparisons with more detail. Most reports show the Pi 4 drawing ~2.8 W in idle headless mode, and the Pi 3B+ drawing ~1.9-2.…

I had Home Assistant on an RPi 3 with 1 GB RAM and a USB thumb drive until sometime maybe 7-10 days ago when I switched to an RPi 5 with 8 GB RAM and the 256 GB SSD and NVME had sold by the RPi company.

The 3 was and the 5 is plugged into an energy monitoring smart outlet. Here's a graph of power for that outlet [1] for the last 30 days.

HA uses long term statistics for older than 10 days, which is why the 2/3 to the left shows much less variation. The switch from the 3 to the 5 is somewhere a little way into the right 1/3, where it is using shorter term data which has a much higher sample rate.

It does look like the average power goes up with the 5, but not nearly as much as I would have thought. The left 2/3 which was definitely all RPi 3, averages 2.48 W. From Jan 17 to the present, which was definitely all RPi 5, it averages 2.64 W.

If those reports of 2.8 W for an idle 4 are accurate I'm curious why my HA 5 is lower. I've got an unused energy monitoring smart plug of the same kind my HA Pi is on. I'll have to put the 4 on that and see how it compares.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/qa7SD2O

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

#70

Post by travisgriggs »

About 7 years ago, we deployed a “gateway/orchestration” role device in ag tech. Power draw is a big concern for us (not a lot of free power out in the middle of fields). We used an SBC from Emtrion. I remember asking my EE counterpart at the time “why not a Pi? Surely someone makes hardened versions of those?” He was skeptical and I think the aura of “toy/hobby/maker” scared him off.

Fast forward. We’re getting ready to role out our next generation. It’s based on the Pi Compute Module 4 (the CMs are basically just the basic Pi and you put your own carrier board for peripherals under it). It is amazing. It has easily 20x the power, 20x the RAM, better temp specs and such, a great eco system, uses about 30% less power, and about 1/5 of the price. The only thing we’re not sure about yet, is the robustness of the BLE with the onboard radio chip.

It’s amazing how far these things have come. For low volume product builds, it’s hard to find a reason not to use one of the CMs.

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