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 release. The figures in this article are now accurate and up-to-date as per the version of Raspbian released on the 14th of March 2018.

Specifications

SoC: Broadcom BCM2837B0 quad-core A53 (ARMv8) 64-bit @ 1.4GHz
GPU: Broadcom Videocore-IV
RAM: 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM
Networking: Gigabit Ethernet, 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi
Bluetooth: Bluetooth 4.2, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
Storage: Micro-SD
GPIO: 40-pin GPIO header, populated
Ports: HDMI, 3.5mm analogue audio-video jack, 4x USB 2.0, Ethernet, Camera Serial Interface (CSI), Display Serial Interface (DSI)
Dimensions: 82mm x 56mm x 19.5mm, 50g

The overall specifications are largely unchanged from the Pi 3 bar the inclusion of gigabit…