8-Way ARM Board Linux Benchmark Comparison From The Pi Zero & ODROID To Tegra

For those interested in small, low-power ARM single-board computers, up for your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of several different boards from the Raspberry Pi Zero to the Banana Pi M2.

The kind folks at LoverPi.com sent over many of the ARM boards seen in this comparison today. They provided the ODROID C1 Plus, Raspberry Pi 2, Orange Pi Plus, Orange Pi PC, and Banana Pi M2. They will also be allowing some other ARM board Linux tests on Phoronix in the future. Beyond those various ARM SBCs, for this performance comparison I also included a Raspberry Pi Zero, NVIDIA Jetson TK1, and NVIDIA Jetson TX1.

If you are unfamiliar with these ARM boards, here's an overview:

The ODROID-C1+ is powered by an Amlogic S805 SoC that provides four Cortex-A5 1.5GHz quad-core CPU cores and Mali 450 MP2 graphics. This $37 USD ARM board has 1GB of RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, 40-pin GPIO, eMMC / micro-SD, 4 x USB 2.0, infrared receiver, and is officially supported with Ubuntu and Android while other Linux distributions have been ported over. The ODROID-C1+ is offered by Hardkernel.

The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B really needs no introduction, but for those that forget the specs, this Broadcom-powered $35 board is based on a quad-core 900MHz Cortex-A7 design, has 1GB of RAM, four USB ports, 40 GPIO pins, Ethernet, microSD, and a VideoCore IV 3D core.

The Orange Pi Plus features an Allwinner H3 SoC featuring a quad-core Cortex-A7 1.6GHz processor, four USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, 8GB eMMC flash, TF card slot, and there's even a Serial ATA 2.0 port. This ARM SBC sells for around $45.

The Orange Pi PC meanwhile also uses a Allwinner H3 SoC with Cortex-A7 quad-core 1.6GHz processor but doesn't have SATA 2.0 nor the 8GB eMMC flash storage, but there is still the TF card slot, 100M Ethernet, three USB 2.0 ports, and a camera interface. This cheaper Orange Pi retails for around $25 USD.

Lastly, the Banana Pi M2 is built around an Allwinner A31S SoC with quad-core Cortex-A7 processor at 1GHz, sports 1GB of RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, four USB 2.0 ports, and has onboard WiFi. The Banana Pi M2 also sells for around $45 USD.

These are all sub-$50 ARM single-board computers being tested today and thus are 32-bit ARMv7 boards. The specs aren't as impressive as say the Jetson TX1 with Tegra X1 SoC with 4GB of RAM, quad-core Cortex-A57, 16GB eMMC, Maxwell GPU, etc, but then again the price isn't as nearly as much. As being much cheaper than the TX1, I also included the Jetson TK1 for reference with its quad-core Cortex-A15 design, Kepler GPU, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB eMMC memory. Of course, I also couldn't resist including the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero with its Broadcom BCM2835 SoC with 1GHz ARM11 core, 512MB RAM, and micro-SD slot.