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I am trying to find raw benchmark numbers between any fairly modern desktop processor and the Raspberry Pi 4gb/8gb, but I am struggling to do so.

I understand that there are architectural differences meaning that some benchmarks can not be run on both an x86 instruction set and an Arm based instruction set.

What I hope to determine from the raw performance numbers is if the Pi 4 is powerful enough to replace a dual/quad core desktop CPU based VPS with a similar amount of RAM.

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  • Consider using Pi's for specific purposes as an "appliance". examples include simple servers like DNS/PiHole, or a VPN gateway, or perhaps running Kodi for a home theatre. They are not really general purpose multi-use systems,
    – Frank Thomas
    Commented Aug 21, 2020 at 3:52
  • @mokubai IMHO, none of your links really speak to this question - they don't refer to a chipset simolar to that in the Pi4, nor do they provide a metric on how to do such a comparison. Your X86 vs rm link is a 10 year old question.
    – davidgo
    Commented Aug 21, 2020 at 10:18
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    see a real benchmark here: How A Raspberry Pi 4 Performs Against Intel's Latest Celeron, Pentium CPUs
    – phuclv
    Commented Aug 23, 2020 at 0:32
  • A Pi 4 can be 6 times slower than a modern CPU, when considering pure CPU performance: raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/114144/… . I still find this impressive.
    – The Impaler
    Commented Dec 26, 2020 at 4:01
  • I wrote a program in C to count the of palindromic numbers between a lower and upper limit and compiled it on a desktop PC (i7 4790, 16 GB RAM, Debian 9) and a Raspberry Pi 4, 8 GB RAM, and got a speed ratio of 4 to 1.
    – Michael Harvey
    Commented Nov 11, 2021 at 20:29

1 Answer 1

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It's NOT. You can use a Pi for entry level computing and basic web browsing, but it's limited.

Pis are remarkable for what they are, but their CPU performance is a fraction of a desktop CPU (and it's not an Arm vs x86 thing). A Pi4 is apparently slightly slower than an Atom x5-Z8350 - which puts it at a "Passmark" speed of broadly 900. And that's probably about right; an order of 3 times the speed of the ancient Pentium 4 workhorse. A typical entry level x86 CPU would have a Passmark speed of 3 times that.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1540169 compares the Pi4 against the x5-z8350 - The x5-z8350 is an entry level CPU from quarter 1, 2016.

I've not used a Pi much but have used other embedded boards and you need to watch out for things like disk IO - especially if you are relying on an SD card.

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    Its worth having a read of tomshardware.com/reviews/raspberry-pi-4 which comes to not dissimilar (but slightly more optimistic) ones to what I deduced above.
    – davidgo
    Commented Aug 21, 2020 at 3:59
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    This is an excellent answer, and I'd like to contribute a bit more to it if I can. The Pi 4 uses a 28nm lithography, which makes it close to the lithography that Intel and AMD used in the year 2011 (though they never used 28nm, but 2011 is where it would fit). So, it will have 'raw' computing power resembling a low-end chip of that era, especially one expected to run without a fan or heatsink. It's not a perfect comparison as the Pi has some hardware-accelerated graphics and video codecs, and more recent I/O; but overall raw number-crunching is low-end 2010-2012 era.
    – user3685427
    Commented Sep 5, 2023 at 16:34

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