Raspberry Pi 3 : Is it worth for energy efficiency ?

The Pi 3 is out. Ok more feature and more performance but energy is important if you want to use on battery.

Raspberrypi.org release a benchmark which show a clear improvement on performance.

But also a clear increasing of power draw :

Does it is justify by the performance ?

We need to add a metric : performance by energy. Performance by watt is for example a widespread metric on HPC server.

On the Raspberry.or benchmark, we have Ampere for power, MIPS and MWIPS for performance (issue respectively of Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmark). So we will have MIPS/A and MWIPS/A. Ah or Wh would have be better because they are energy and not power or current.

It give :

Raspberry A+ and Zero are the winner in term of efficiency. Pi3 is a little better in term of floating performance efficiency (MWIPS/A) but almost identical for interger performance.

And if we watch the idle power, Pi3 is 3 times more consumer that the Model A+ and the Zero.

So Pi3 seems not to be the best choose if you want a energy efficient solution. I mean that it is not a bad solution, but if the Model A+ and Zero is ok for you for the moment, you can stay with this solutions !