Benchmarks Of The $5 Raspberry Pi Zero

For those curious about the performance of the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero, here are some benchmarks I've just finished up for this low-end, low-power ARM development board compared to other ARM, MIPS, and x86 hardware.

The Raspberry Pi Zero launched one week ago as the foundation's cheapest board yet (just $5 USD!) and also their smallest at about half the size of a Raspberry Pi Model A+. The Raspberry Pi Zero features a 1GHz single-core ARM processor, 512MB of RAM, mini HDMI and USB OTG ports, and a 40-pin header. There isn't any onboard Ethernet so you'll need to end up using a USB-based Ethernet or WiFi adapter. The Broadcom SoC in use by the Raspberry Pi Zero is a BCM2708.

For my initial testing of the Raspberry Pi Zero I was using the Debian-based Raspbian 8.0 with the Linux 4.1 kernel, LXDE desktop, and GCC 4.9.2 compiler.

There are two OpenBenchmarking.org result files that were used for this initial Raspberry Pi Zero benchmark comparison with the Phoronix Test Suite. First are some results comparing the Raspberry Pi Zero to the Raspberry Pi 2 (also using Raspbian 8.0) and then to high-end ARM boards: the NVIDIA Jetson TK1 and Jetson TX1.

The second set of results to share today from the Pi Zero are of the $5 ARM SBC compared to a i.MX6 quad-core Cortex-A9 system, an Intel Compute Stick with Atom Z3735, an Intel NUC with Celeron N2820 Bay Trail, and Intel NUC with Core i3 5010U Broadwell.

These are just the first of more Raspberry Pi benchmarks to come on Phoronix, including comparisons to other ARM boards.