Pi 3 vs Pi 2
Pi versus Pi
One year after the
Raspberry Pi 2 B was unveiled as the first ‘performance’ Pi, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced the Raspberry Pi 3. It looks the same, it costs the same. But it isn’t the same.
We’ve been using the two circuit board computers side-by-side to see if it’s worth upgrading. Without wanting to spoil the surprise, claims that the Raspberry Pi 3 is 50 per cent faster than the Pi 2 B are on-the-money, more-or-less.
Raspberry Pi 3 vs Pi 2: Hardware
In typical Raspberry Pi Foundation style, the Raspberry Pi 3 doesn’t aim for hardware upgrades that’ll just look good on a spec sheet and mean little in terms of real performance. Quite the opposite.
The Raspberry Pi 2 has a quad-core 900MHz CPU, the Pi 3 a quad-core 1.2GHz one. Both have 1GB RAM and both use a fourth-generation VideoCore CPU.
From a glance you could dismiss this as a connectivity upgrade, but the performance boost is big. Very big.
First, while the CPU only gains 300MHz, it also updates its architecture from a Cortex-A7 set to a Cortex-A53 one. This is an architecture boost from
32-bit to 64-bit, and gets you better performance for your clock speed.
Next up, the GPU. Both are VideoCore IV chipsets, but where the Pi 2 is clocked at 250MHz, this new one is 400MHz.
While they’re both designed to deliver 1080p video rather than 4K, this means the graphics chip has been scaled up with the CPU. The Raspberry Pi Foundation knows what it’s doing.
Perhaps the least well-documented upgrade is the RAM. Both models have 1GB, both are forms of DDR2. But where the Raspberry Pi 2 has 450MHz, RAM, the Pi 3 has 900MHz RAM.
Geekbench 2.4.2
Pi 3 - 2086
Integer 1641
Floating point 3353
Memory 1204
Stream 978
Pi 2 - 1302
Integer - 998
floating point - 2126
Memory - 729
Stream - 631
Sticking to familiar benchmarks we also tried
Sunspider 1.0.2 . While, like Geekbench 2.4.2, it’s no longer supported, it’s a benchmarks we’ve used many, may times over the years. It’s a Javascript benchmark, if you’ve not come across it before. It makes a computer perform a whole bunch of tasks and calculates how long it takes to complete. Lower scores are better, then:
Pi 3
2888.8ms
Pi 2
4705ms
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