(Tested) ASUS Tinker Board vs Raspberry Pi 3: CPU and GPU Benchmarks

According to the specifications, the Tinker Board is more powerful than the Raspberry Pi 3. Let’s see if it’s true with several CPU/GPU benchmarks.

Hardware / Software details:

– HW: Tinker Board rev 1.2, default clock speed – SW: Tinker OS 2.0.4
– HW: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B v1.2, default clock speed – SW: Raspbian Stretch (v2017-11-29)

 

1 – CPU Benchmark

1.1 – Sysbench

To benchmark the CPU, I used Sysbench 0.4.12, a cross-platform and multi-threaded benchmark tool. The installation of Sysbench on Tinker OS and Raspbian is rather easy:

$ sudo apt-get install sysbench

Now that Sysbench is installed, we can launch the multi-threaded (4 threads) CPU test with:

$ sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 --num-threads=4 run

65 seconds – Tinker Board (default clock speed) – Tinker OS 2.0.4

96 seconds – Raspberry Pi 3 (default clock speed) – Raspbian Stretch

Rule for these scores: lower is faster.

The output of Sysbench for the Tinker Board is:

sysbench 0.4.12:  multi-threaded system evaluation benchmark

Running the test with following options:
Number of threads: 4

Doing CPU performance benchmark

Threads started!
Done.

Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 20000


Test execution summary:
    total time:                          65.0652s
    total number of events:              10000
    total time taken by event execution: 260.1871
    per-request statistics:
         min:                                 25.10ms
         avg:                                 26.02ms
         max:                                 86.35ms
         approx.  95 percentile:              28.23ms

Threads fairness:
    events (avg/stddev):           2500.0000/30.69
    execution time (avg/stddev):   65.0468/0.01

 

1.2 – LLVMPIPE Software Renderer

For this second multi-threaded CPU bench, I used GeeXLab with the LLVMPIPE software rasterizer. LLVMPIPE is a multi-threaded and highly optimized software rasterizer (more info HERE). On the Tinker Board, you have have access to that software renderer if you use GeeXLab with OpenGL desktop. On the Raspberry Pi 3, you have to disable the OpenGL desktop support (raspi-config can help) and use this version of GeeXLab.

I selected the following shadertoy demo that runs in software mode on both Tinker Board and Raspberry Pi 3. This demo is shipped with GeeXLab and you can find it in the demos folder (demos/shadertoy/09-noise-animation-electric.xml). The resolution is 600×380 which is more than enough for our little SBCs! On both SBCs, the CPU usage is near 100%.

Both boards have the OpenGL renderer:

GL_RENDERER: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 3.9, 128 bits)

 

7 FPS – Tinker Board (default clock speed) – Tinker OS 2.0.4

1 FPS – Raspberry Pi 3 (default clock speed) – Raspbian Stretch

Rule for these scores: higher is faster.

 

2 – GPU Benchmark

For the GPU benchmark, I used GeeXLab with the OpenGL ES renderer because on both boards, OpenGL ES is hardware accelerated. For the Tinker Board, you can use this version of GeeXLab. On the Raspberry Pi 3 with Raspbian Stretch, you can use this version of GeeXLab.

I launched the same shadertoy than for the CPU benchmark, the only difference is the resolution: 1280×720.

On both boards, the CPU usage is very low (less than 3%).

 

30 FPS – Tinker Board (default clock speed) – Tinker OS 2.0.4

19 FPS – Raspberry Pi 3 (default clock speed) – Raspbian Stretch

Rule for these scores: higher is faster.

 

3 – Conclusion

What can I say? The Tinker Board is faster than the Raspberry Pi 3, no doubt on that fact. The CPU is faster, the GPU is faster.