Raspberry PI 4 vs Smartphone

[raym3d]

Hello.

My question is: which is faster, an android Smartphone (for example, 6 GB RAM) or a Raspberry (4 GB RAM)?

I'm just judging it by RAM, but, maybe there is another component that I don't know. Maybe the processor is better, I honestly don't know.

Greetings.

[drgeoff]

Faster doing what?

[davidcoton]

Faster for what?
For example, faster to

• make a phone call?
• tell the time?
• change a wheel on a car?
• search the web for a new car?
• edit photographs?
• write a novel?
• compute Pi to the last digit?

[raym3d]

Faster in relation to watching a video and using the camera (for example).

[HawaiianPi]

The answer would depend on what phone you are comparing it to, but in general most recent mid to top tier smartphones will likely be more powerful than a Raspberry Pi 4B (high end models are significantly more powerful).

For example, I recently ran the Speedometer 2.0 browser benchmark on my Pi 4B 4GB and got a score of 17.1, while my OnePlus 7 Pro smart phone more than doubles that (35.4). Of course my Pi 4B4 cost less than $100, while the phone was almost $700.

However, if price is part of the judgement, then my budget gaming laptop was only a little more than my smartphone and scored 87.2, and my Chromebook could be found on sale for about half the price of my phone, and scored 68.3 (almost double the phone's score). But it's much easier to make calls with the phone, and it's also a lot more portable.

So it all depends on what you want to accomplish.

Faster in relation to watching a video and using the camera (for example).

In that case the phone wins easily. Video playback on every smart phone I've owned is far better than on a Pi4, and so are the cameras (compared to the official RPF camera). Ease of use is also much better on an Android phone (but that's also true of my Chromebook).

You are really comparing very different devices intended for very different purposes. In other words, it's not a logical or fair comparison.

[DougieLawson]

I'm just judging it by RAM, but, maybe there is another component that I don't know. Maybe the processor is better, I honestly don't know.

There's no correlation between RAM capacity and processor speed. You're comparing apples with oranges.

[LTolledo]

Get a "smart"phone instead!

[bomblord]

When it comes to relative power (ex in calculations/a set period of time) most mid-high end smartphones absolutely decimate the Pi especially on the GPU side. Only phones that will be slower would be low end cheap devices. Remember, you're comparing a $35 computer to $300-$1000 phones.

[bjtheone]

Looking at it another way, my smartphone regularly does 130 km/h whereas my Pi just sits on my desk, so "my" smartphone is much faster.

But seriously now, it is an fairly non answerable question. You would need to quantify what your measurement of speed was to get a real answer. Having said that, a modern (mid to high tier) smartphone will have a better CPU, likely faster RAM, and hence be substantially faster by traditional computer speed test metrics. The Pi might be better when compared via cost normalized speed metrics (ie speed metric/cost). My phone cost over $1000, my Pi cost $65 and I doubt my phone is 15 times faster at most things.

It also depends on which metric you are interested in, since some are binary in nature. For example both can stream video at 1080p, both can do email, etc.

[rin67630]

Faster doing what?

I would have been interested to know which one is faster upon communicating over SPI/TWI to a bench of stepper motors.


P.S. Have you tried to program anything on a smartphone?

[Heater]

My smartphone leaks information about me to all an sundry much faster than any Pi I own.

[Imperf3kt]

So does your TV, your fridge, your watch, your electricity meter, your car, the shops you visit, heck, even your favourite websites unless you specifically tell them not to (I recently discovered roosterteeth.com sells user data [without telling you] unless you manually opt out, suffice to say they will never see a cent from me ever again)

In any case, I see no issue in my "data" being taken, it's only helping keep the ads I'm not interested in away from me.


You can always pick up a second hand last year's model smartphone and turn the network features off if you're that paranoid about your "data" leaking.

[rpdom]

So does your TV, your fridge, your watch, your electricity meter, your car, the shops you visit, heck, even your favourite websites

In my case I will disagree with the first five in that list

[pagenotfound]

Faster in relation to watching a video and using the camera (for example).

In that case the phone wins easily. Video playback on every smart phone I've owned is far better than on a Pi4, and so are the cameras (compared to the official RPF camera). Ease of use is also much better on an Android phone (but that's also true of my Chromebook).

You are really comparing very different devices intended for very different purposes. In other words, it's not a logical or fair comparison.

Better? My Pi4 plays 2K videos without any glitches. What would be better than that? 4K videos on a 7 inch screen?

Ease of use? Actually finding the videos among many of them on a large HD (does the phone even have that?) is much more convenient with a real file manager or a VLC playlist on a big screen. I find watching videos slightly annoying even on medium sized tablets.

Also, have you seen my excessively customized control bars in VLC player? Good luck using that with your fingers on a phone.

[Imperf3kt]

You are aware that smartphones have been able to accept mice as input devices since the very first Android was released and you can also connect external monitors.
If you don't like a file manager, download a different one?

MX Player Pro is a rather good media player for mobile devices.

Admittedly, I'm not trying to convince you a phone is what you want, but rather that it's not as bad as you appear to imagine.

The point is to help the OP determine what device is most suitable for them, and from what they described, a smartphone seems the most appropriate for that task.