Hi there,
On 08/29/2017 06:07 PM, Adam Cecile wrote:
Could be an alternative indeed, but what about the speed compared to
my quad-core i5 with qemu ?
I haven't actually tried that specific comparison, but form my
experience a Pi tends to be a tiny bit faster in pure CPU
performance than qemu on Intel. (But not much.) The RPi3 is
also a quad core, so that is similar. YMMV may vary depending
on the precise workload though.
That said:
- It has only 1 GiB of RAM. That might be a problem.
- It doesn't have as much cache as an Intel Core CPU, so if
you have workloads that require a lot of memory access,
that'll probably offset any small advantages in pure CPU
performance.
- I/O is quite slow. If you compile large things my guess is
that just because of I/O it'll take longer on the Pi than
with qemu.
OTOH, it's cheap, so even if it's not the right thing in the
end you're not going to waste a ton of money. You could also
first buy just the board and power supply and only buy a case
and other accessories once you've verified that it's sufficient
for your use case.
Then again, there are also other ARM boards in a similar price
range out there, which might suit your use case better. But I
really am not an expert here, I've just played around with the
Pi a bit in the past...
Regards,
Christian