Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Benchmarks - Nice For $15
At the end of October came the pleasant surprise of the introduction of the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. This drop-in replacement to the original Raspberry Pi Zero features a more powerful 1.0GHz quad-core Cortex-A53 compared to the miniscule 1GHz single-core design of the original Pi Zero while boasting 512MB of LPDDR2 RAM. Here are some initial benchmarks of the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W for those curious about its performance.
Over the past month I've been playing with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, kindly provided by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. This 65 x 30 mm single board computer has been working out well and offering a nice performance potential for its size factor -- much more interesting for any modest workloads than the original single-core Raspberry Pi Zero.
The 802.11n WiFi has been working reliably on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W with Raspbian OS. All in it's been an interesting little gadget powered by the Broadcom BCM2710A1.
Given the current supply chain disruptions and everything going on globally, when the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W was announced I was curious how the availability and pricing would ultimately play out... It's been spot on now and a month later still having robust availability and various Internet retailers sticking to the $15 price point.
The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is undoubtedly faster than the Raspberry Pi Zero, which is rather painful to benchmark due to the single-core SoC. It's really not even worth comparing to the original Zero due to the speed difference and simply put much more software can handle the Pi Zero 2 W. The 512MB system RAM may be a bottleneck for some use-cases still leading to the Raspberry Pi 4 working out much better for performance sensitive work and needing greater system RAM capacities, but for small workloads the 2 W is capable.
For getting an idea of the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, I ran some fresh benchmarks against the Raspberry Pi 4 (Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard model) as well as the SiFive HiFive Unmatched for how that RISC-V development board compares.