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jeikabu
jeikabu

Posted on • Originally published at rendered-obsolete.github.io on

Raspberry Pi 4

Late last year I finally got my hands on a Raspberry Pi 4.

Didn’t have any specific plans since the Pi 3 is suitable for my projects. But, I was curious how it stacked up against the rest of the Pi family (from Wikipedia):

Model CPU GPU Memory Interfaces
RPi Zero W 1× ARM1176JZF-S @ 1 GHz Broadcom VideoCore IV @ 250 MHz 512 MB HDMI, micro-USB 2.0, Wifi b/g/n single band @ 2.4 GHz, BT 4.1 BLE
RPi 3 B 4x Cortex-A53 @ 1.2 GHz Broadcom VideoCore IV @ 250 MHz 1 GB HDMI v1.3, USB 2.0, 100 Mbit ethernet, Wifi b/g/n single band @ 2.4 GHz, BT 4.1 BLE
RPi 4 B 4x Cortex-A72 @ 1.5 GHz Broadcom VideoCore VI @ 500 MHz 2/4/8 GB micro-HDMI v2.0, USB 3.0 (type C), 1000 Mbit ethernet, Wifi b/g/n/ac dual band @ 2.4/5 GHz, BT 5.0

Setup

Usually, I do manual installation, but there’s a new installation helper, Raspberry Pi Imager:

Attach a screen/keyboard/mouse or continue with headless setup by creating two files on the SD card.

Create wpa_supplicant.conf file in root of the boot partition:

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=<Insert 2 letter ISO 3166-1 country code here>

network={
 ssid="<Name of your wireless LAN>"
 psk="<Password for your wireless LAN>"
}
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Where the value of country is “Alpha-2 code” from this Wikipedia table.

Enable remote SSH by creating an empty ssh file in the same place.

Power on, check your wifi AP for the IP address, and ssh pi@IP_ADDRESS (default password is “raspberry”).

Benchmarks

Next, install and run Phoronix Test Suite to compare against our previous results:

wget http://phoronix-test-suite.com/releases/repo/pts.debian/files/phoronix-test-suite_10.2.0_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i phoronix-test-suite_10.2.0_all.deb
phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1809111-RA-ARMLINUX005
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Test Pi Zero Pi 3 B Pi 4 B (8GB) Nano TX1 Notes
Tinymembench (memcpy) 291 1297 2729 3504 3862
TTSIOD 3D Renderer 15.66 40.83 45.05
7-Zip Compression 205 1863 3631 3996 4526
C-Ray 2357 732 943 851 Seconds (lower is better)
Primesieve 1543 580 466 401 Seconds (lower is better)
AOBench 778 333 123 190 165 Seconds (lower is better)
FLAC Audio Encoding 971.18 387.09 102.02 103.57 78.86 Seconds (lower is better)
LAME MP3 Encoding 780 352.66 124.98 143.82 113.14 Seconds (lower is better)
Perl (Pod2html) 5.3830 1.2945 0.6291 0.7154 0.6007 Seconds (lower is better)
PostgreSQL (Read Only) 6640 10455 12410 16079
Redis (GET) 34567 213067 568431 484688
PyBench 76419 24349 5263 7030 6348 ms (lower is better)
Scikit-Learn 844 496 434 Seconds (lower is better)

The Raspberry Pi 4 w/ 8 GB is in roughly the same performance class as the $99 Nvidia Jetson Nano. Although the comparison is a bit apples-to-oranges since the Nano only has 4 GB of memory.

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