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Wireless Networking Hardware Technology

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ Benchmarks Show Significantly Improved Performance (phoronix.com) 85

fstack writes: Pi Day was marked this year by the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ as the next evolution to this $35 ARM single-board computer. Phoronix has now put out Raspberry Pi 3 B+ benchmarks showing that the Ethernet performance is indeed much faster now but still doesn't stack up to other high performance boards, the SoC temperature is noticeably lower than the very warm Raspberry Pi 3, and the overall performance is a nice upgrade while retaining the same price point as its predecessors. Follow up tests looking at the Wi-Fi performance also show the new 802.11ac dual-band wireless to be much faster as well.
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Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ Benchmarks Show Significantly Improved Performance

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  • Too bad they couldn't upgrade the server to the B+ so I could actually read this story.

  • by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Sunday March 25, 2018 @02:08PM (#56324051)
    I'd really like to see a Pi Model 3 B++ model that has 2GB memory. :)
    • by JeremyR ( 6924 )

      The Odroid C2 may fit the bill. I have two of them and am pretty impressed.

      • ...The Odroid C2 may fit the bill....

        Thanks. I'll take a look at those.

        • I've got a C2. I needed to run a Java app on something Raspberry Pi sized. The Pi could just barely manage it - app was unusable. It runs just fine on C2. The extra memory made a huge difference.
      • by harrkev ( 623093 )

        One of the advantages of the Pi is that you have a HUGE ecosystem around it. If you have a question, the odds are that somebody else has had the same one. The distros are updated fairly often, and you can get custom distros to do one specific thing (like retro emulation or media center, for example).

        The problem with any non-Pi single-board computer is the lack of support.

        The C-2 looks cool, but Ubuntu 16.04 (almost two years old) is the latest Linux supported. Want android? Android 5.1 (over three year

    • by amiga3D ( 567632 )

      What for? You can pick up a computer out of the trash that'll leave it in the dust as a desktop. The Pi is for tinkering and hobbyists and teaching. It's a throwaway design that you can blow away and go "oh well." More ram will consume more power in a design where most users are counting milliamps. Most of mine are running off of solar powered batteries. It's fascinating to watch what people can find to use them for. It reminds me of my early days of computing when it was more a hobby than anything else. Co

      • ...What for?...

        Small form factor.

      • ... It reminds me of my early days of computing when it was more a hobby than anything else....

        Yup. Back when all I had was 64k of memory to work with, and I had to solder the computer together.... Ahhh... those were the days.

        • by amiga3D ( 567632 )

          My first computer had 64K of RAM and I did actually do some soldering on it. Most of the chips were socketed as well.

  • by catchblue22 ( 1004569 ) on Sunday March 25, 2018 @02:12PM (#56324075) Homepage

    I'm setting up a small computer classroom for robotics and programming. The only thing the current Pi-3 doesn't do that I really need is to run the OnShape online CAD program (since it doesn't seem to have enough power to run WebGL properly). I'm hoping that the new version will have enough resources to run OnShape. It would mean that students could design, slice, and 3D print objects for robots, and to program those robots, all with just a Raspberry Pi. The cool thing is that the current version of the Pi-3 is powerful enough to run TensorFlow, so our robots (which use Pi-3's) can actually do camera based machine learning (we do the training on regular PC's, though it can be done rather slowly on the Pi-3).

    • >> It would mean that students could design, slice, and 3D print objects for robots, and to program those robots, all with just a Raspberry Pi.

      The requirements for a robot controller and for a CAD workstation are quite different. If you'd want a similarity of the environment/os (linux) why not get them a cheap chrombook or a PC running Ubuntu? Any PI would be substantially limited (by cost, power and size) to be a reasonable CAD workstation.

      • by catchblue22 ( 1004569 ) on Sunday March 25, 2018 @03:23PM (#56324383) Homepage

        Any PI would be substantially limited (by cost, power and size) to be a reasonable CAD workstation.

        I don't think you understand what OnShape [onshape.com] is. It is web based CAD created by some of the original developers of SolidWorks. It runs almost entirely in the cloud. It can be run on phones, iPad's or old crappy computers. And it is arguably better than SolidWorks. Some universities are literally considering dropping SolidWorks for OnShape because it is so easy to support. All it needs is a browser that can run WebGL. I've been running it with old Core 2 Duo's with crap low end video cards, and it runs perfectly well. There are no typical CAD workstation requirements because most of the computation is being done off site. So, if the new raspberry Pi 3b+ is capable of running WebGL, then then it most definitely COULD be a CAD workstation.

        • That's all well and good but why limit yourself with local, client-side performance of one instruction per turn of the fucking galactic wheel? The Pi is a both a badass movement and an impressive piece of hardware but your task sounds... gratuitous. Get some used Core2 machines for the same dollar value, lose on your power bill and [greatly] save on time and frustration (I'm guessing).

          "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."

        • by 4wdloop ( 1031398 ) on Monday March 26, 2018 @12:59AM (#56326313)

          >> I don't think you understand what OnShape [onshape.com] is.

          OnShape as well as many other Web-based CADs (did you try the TinkerCad?) use client-side rendering (projecting a 3D object into 2D screen surface). That is, the client's (here the PI or whatever your students are using locally) CPU/GPU is processing a 3D instructions of WebGl and plotting it to the 2D screen - a lot of floating point math involved.

          WebGl (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]) is client-side rendering functionality.

          RPi has a 'decent' GPU (measured by cost and power) but it is limited, esp with respect to the memory size and number of FLOPs and likely memory bandwidth. Usually, CAD models are complicated enough to demand more resources. All in all you are going to make the students suffer through a sluggish process.

          >> It runs almost entirely in the cloud.

          If it did it would not need WebGl. The cloud would render the 3D into a 'picture' surface and serve it back to client. I do not think this is how it works. All in all it would make the UI rather sluggish as the round-trip latency would be remarkable.

        • Thank You for the lead on the OnShape CAD software.
          As an ancient programmer/developer (yep, soldered my first motherboard with 16K ram and had to hand program my BIOS chip at my college computer center). I have wanted to keep 'playing around' with the newer components and devices, but the software co$t$ were just stupendously expensive and far beyond my retired budget.
          OnShape even has a FREE version for the old codgers like me, so it is absolutely perfect for the low-budget hobbyest.

    • by hogger ( 566646 )

      What about Freecad? Best I can tell it works fine on RPi.

  • OOO vs in-order (Score:5, Informative)

    by Misagon ( 1135 ) on Sunday March 25, 2018 @02:52PM (#56324261)

    What I found the most interesting in these benchmarks however is how much faster the Asus Tinkerboard is.
    It also has four ARM cores and clocked at 1.8 GHz (a third faster) but is several times faster than the Raspberry Pi B+ in some CPU benchmarks. The difference is that the Tinkerboard's CPU cores are running out-of-order while the Raspberry Pi B+'s A53 cores run in-order.

    Other than that, the A53 is capable of running 64-bit ARM code which is supposed to be faster than the corresponding 32-bit code.
    These tests were run on Raspbian however, which does still not have support for 64-bit code.

    • I've had rockchip-based boards before. Support is meh, around the same level as Allwinner. Pass.

      The big deal about R-Pi is the community and the level of support. It's not amazing, but it's still better than almost anything else. Except maybe beaglebone? Haven't dipped into there yet.

      • Re:OOO vs in-order (Score:4, Interesting)

        by youngone ( 975102 ) on Sunday March 25, 2018 @05:09PM (#56324867)

        The big deal about R-Pi is the community and the level of support.

        Exactly. I purchased a RPi 3B+ on Friday and set it up with a HiFiBerry DAC + and a 7" touchscreen, then installed Volumio and plugged in a good set of powered speakers.
        It runs significantly faster than the old RPi B I had been using, and I am extremely happy, as I now have a nice sounding very small music box that is easy to use.
        One issue I am having is that I see the yellow "lightening bolt" that shows the power supply is not quite up to the job. It seems to come on and off occasionally without impacting performance, so maybe I shouldn't worry, but if anyone can point me to a better supply than this one [nicegear.nz] I would be grateful.
        I have tried several other SBC type devices, and unless they're X86 or X64 they're significantly worse than RPi just because of the great support RPi has.

        • I just use a lm2596 buck module from eBay to power my original Pi. They can handle 3A, so there should be plenty of headroom. I feed that from any wall wart.

        • Make sure you use a beefy power cable as well. I find that some wall worts (wall warts?) work OK with some cables but not with others.

    • by tomxor ( 2379126 )

      It also has four ARM cores and clocked at 1.8 GHz (a third faster) but is several times faster than the Raspberry Pi B+ in some CPU benchmarks. The difference is that the Tinkerboard's CPU cores are running out-of-order while the Raspberry Pi B+'s A53 cores run in-order.

      Yes Hz isn't everything, but then out-of-order isn't either, (not just talking about spectre and co either), but power efficiency, scalar CPUs have the edge there and it makes me wonder what the future will be like when CPUs are made for pennies and the real cost is power. But speaking in more current terms, people do like to use these boards for battery powered projects, and that's where the pi zero will rule for power efficiency (not just absolute power draw but compute-per-watt).

      • and the real cost is power

        Supposedly that will steadily come down as well. There will, however, always be killer power-hungry apps (processor power, not electrical) for the foreseeable future: all the anti-VR folks' vitriol notwithstanding, with the world population continuing to climb exponentially (barring early onset of WW III.x) and the increasing likelihood that the only escape from the [sordid reality of the average person's existence] will be through VR... bit that's not necessarily all bad, as by then VR will have become the

    • Some applications can be faster in 32bit mode, as you have less memory bandwidth overhead with pointers.
      Most SBC's have shit memory performance, typically 16bit DDR3.

      Compared to PC's, which have had at least 64bit wide memory since the first Pentium (along with the pain of requiring multiples of two 72pin SIMMS)

      Even my first 486 had a 32 bit memory bus

  • by stooo ( 2202012 ) on Sunday March 25, 2018 @03:28PM (#56324413) Homepage

    Is the I2C still broken ? can it now communicate with AVRs and other slower peripherials ??
    https://github.com/raspberrypi... [github.com]

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Is the I2C still broken ? can it now communicate with AVRs and other slower peripherials ??
      https://github.com/raspberrypi... [github.com]

      You can do software bit-banged I2C on Raspberry Pi, complete with full clock stretching support, no problem, see pigpio. it's CPU intensive, but you've got four cores to work with.

    • Doesn't it use the same SOC as the previous (64 bit) models? I thought the shield over the SOC provided better heat dispersion and allowed for a bump in the clock. If so I wouldn't expect any change with this bug.

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