Benchmarking the Raspberry Pi 3 B+

UPDATE: The Raspberry Pi family has a new member, the Raspberry Pi 4 — which means it’s time for another benchmark run!

The launch of the shiny new Raspberry Pi 3 B+ offers a chance to revisit the entire history of the Pi family, benchmarking each device in turn from the original Raspberry Pi Model B launch board with its somewhat limited 256MB of RAM right through to the shiniest and newest board. This post collates the results from a range of different benchmarks, demonstrating how the power of the Pi has changed over the years.

If attempting to replicate the results yourself, there is one key fact to note: the Raspberry Pi has enjoyed somewhere in the range of a 30 percent performance uplift in the last couple of years through software and firmware optimisation alone; comparing the same benchmark run on a Pi using the latest Raspbian operating system today with results gathered a year or more ago will give a false reading, which is why all these results have been gathered using the same firmware and software revision.

Update: The benchmarks in this article have been updated after it was discovered that the Pi Zero on test had developed a fault. The Pi Zero benchmarks have been re-run on a new board and updated, while the Pi Zero W’s SysBench score has also been updated to reflect improvements brought about by the latest firmware…