Raspberry Pi CPU capacity

[RaspK]

Hello,

Please, I have a question about capacity of RP CPU. I am going to make a cluster of RP (e.g. 4 Raspberry pi), and here I want someone with more knowledge and experiences tells me their capacity each. For example, if we compare one Raspberry Pi cpu to an i5 CPU, lets say i5 is faster but tell me with how many fold i5 is faster than the latest release of RP CPU?

Thank you very much.

[riklaunim]

You can't really compare x86 modern CPU with ARM CPUs. They have totally different design and market. Desktop i5 will be have vastly better performance and will be able to run common x86 software and OS. Raspberry with ARM is more suited for embedded solutions with low power requirements at a cost of lower performance. GPU difference is even bigger - ARM GPU in Raspberry has only old OpenGL ES while x86 allows you to use GPU with OpenGL/DirectX. Not to mention USB3, Gigabit Ethernet, USB2 without limitations, SATA, PCIe, multiple display and much more.

Clustering won't do anything as only specific code would be able to use a cluster of computers (and it has to have a fast bus to make it work good).

[headamage]

don't expect even a very large cluster of Pi to match an i5 or an i7. Clusters of Pi already exist and they don't even come close to the performance of a single modern desktop PC. That's why they are mainly used for education purposes. What they can do, is give a very good performance/watt ratio for certain tasks.

[jdb]

http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Raspber ... hmarks.htm

The Pi 2 is approximately equivalent in integer performance (per-core) to the original Pentium 4 "Willamette" (NetBurst architecture) at 1.7GHz, or its contemporary the AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" core at ~1.1GHz.

NEON/multithreaded benchmarks will have performance comparable to much more recent CPUs, but they become harder to measure and compare as you get results that are not solely dependent on CPU throughput with data-intensive benchmarks.

[rpdom]

http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Raspber ... hmarks.htm

The Pi 2 is approximately equivalent in integer performance (per-core) to the original Pentium 4 "Willamette" (NetBurst architecture) at 1.7GHz, or its contemporary the AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" core at ~1.1GHz.

That's much better than I expected. I was pondering replacing a small server (actually an old laptop with a Celeron 500MHz and 384MB) with a Pi 2. Now I can see the Pi 2 will be much more powerful and use a lot less electricity (and less space).

[W. H. Heydt]

Yesterday at the Computer History Museum during the Pi Day activities, they ran a demo of their IBM 1401 (those that know that machine...hold your laughter). Later, someone came up to the table where I had 4 Pis up and running for people to play with and asked me about the comparison of the Pis performance to the 1401.

I grinned and told him that the Pi would blow the socks off the 1401. Since he was pointing to a 512MB Model B, I noted how much RAM the B had and that the *maximum* memory on a 1401 was 16K. The discussion then morphed into discussing storage capacity of the two systems, which with some very generous (to the 1401) approximations quickly showed that the modest 4GB SD card in that Model B would hold the entire tape *library* associated with the 1401.

Now those in the know can laugh. For those not in the know, the 1401 came on the market in 1959.

[DougieLawson]

I've had my Pi1 running Hercules as a S370 running MVS 3.8, JES & TSO. That got about 1.6MIPS (which is more than a S/370-158). I should try it again on my 2B and we should be a long way past the 2.8MIPS S/370-168 (they still had one at NatWest in 1981 when I worked there).

[rpdom]

I've had my Pi1 running Hercules as a S370 running MVS 3.8, JES & TSO.

I'd like to try to get a Pi running a GCOS emulator to try stuff from my days as a Honeywell/Bull sysadmin/DB architect. I'm sure a Pi would beat the performance of the old DPS8/9000 system we had with the old 150MB disk units and the newer 1GB cabinets.