An ARM comparison: Raspberry Pi vs OpenRD Client

Bellow there’s a comparison between Raspberry Pi (Model B) and OpenRD Client, two low-power ARM SoC (System on a Chip), running Linux (Rasbian and Fedora respectively). I used the EEMBC CoreMark benchmark with default settings for 100000, 1000000 and 2000000 iterations. For each set, each device keep its performance with the same rate of iterations per second. The difference between the devices is at, an average level of, 520 iterations per second. That translates to 1.4x faster in favour of the OpenRD Client.

While OpenRD Client performs better, in terms of efficiency, Raspberry Pi seems to doing much better. In terms of CPU, Raspbeery Pi uses a 700MHz (with the possibility of setting it up to 1GHz) ARMv11 processor while OpenRD Client an older 1.2GHz Marvell Sheeva (ARMv5TE). ARMv11 supports an FPU unlike ARMv5 and that is one of the reasons that Raspberry Pi performs quite well despite its lower specifications. In terms of memory, Raspberry Pi uses 256MB DDR2 800MHz (newer models have 512MB RAM), in share with its relatively powerful GPU, while OpenRD Client uses 512MB DDR2 800MHz. OpenRD Client also provides Gigabit Ethernet as well as many more I/O interfaces. Also, OpenRD has preloaded OS, unlike Raspberry Pi that boots from an SD card. During this benchmark, Raspberry Pi was running Rasbian “Wheezy” (unofficial Debian port to armhf) while OpenRD Client Fedora 8.

(Raspberry Pi diagram – http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Raspi_Iso_Blue.png)