Evaluation Item 1: CPU Test
As a foreword, this post is part of our horizontal evaluation of Raspberry Pi 5 and other models. Please see that post for further information on the evaluation.
For a development board, what we care most about is the performance of the CPU. Whether it is the daily office or an AI application, a high performance CPU can provide us with a smoother user experience. From the official specification, we can find the CPU parameters of each Raspberry Pi model. So how should we evaluate CPU performance? The easiest way is to use benchmark software to test it.
| Model | SOC |
|---|---|
| PI 5 | BCM2712 2.4GHz ,64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 |
| PI 4B | BCM2711 1.8GHz, 64-bit Arm Cortex-A72 |
| PI 3B+ | BCM2837B0 1.4GHz, 64-bit Arm Cortex-A53 |
| PI Zero 2W | BCM2710A1 1GHz, 64-bit Arm Cortex-A53 |
We use SysBench for this test, which is open source benchmark software that provides modular, cross-platform, multi-threaded testing tools that can be used to test the performance of hardware such as CPU, memory, and disks. Before the formal test, we also need to install the system for Raspberry Pi. We installed Debian Bookworm Raspberry Pi Desktop (2024-11-19) for this evaluation. The system installation is very simple, so I won’t cover it here.
We powered on the Zero 2W, PI3B+, PI4, and PI5 models one by one, and logged in remotely through MobaXterm. We used SysBench1.0.20 to test the single-thread and multi-thread performance of the four Raspberry Pi models. The test instructions used are as follows:
sysbench cpu --threads=1 --cpu-max-prime=200000 run
sysbench cpu --threads=4 --cpu-max-prime=200000 run
The single-thread and quad-thread results for the four Raspberry Pi models are shown below. From Figure 1, we can clearly see the CPU computing gap between the various Raspberry Pi models. PI5 has the best CPU performance, and it is worthy of being the backbone of the Raspberry Pi.
Figure 1
According to the official description, the performance of PI5 should be 2 to 3 times that of PI4, but according to the test results of sysbench, it is only 1.3 to 1.4 times. Is it possible that the product is not the same as the description? To verify this, we used another software - Geekbench, to do a comprehensive test on CPU performance.
Unfortunately, the memory of PI Zero 2W and PI3B+ is too small to run Geekbench, so we can only get the test reports of PI5 (Raspberry Pi 5 Model B Rev 1.0 - Geekbench) and PI4 (Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.5 - Geekbench).
Judging from the Geekbench test results (Figure 2), the performance of PI5 is about 2.3 times that of PI4, which is in line with expectations. Since the test benchmarks used by sysbench and Geekbench are different, the test data is for reference only.
Figure 2