Octane 2 on the Raspberry Pi Zero vs Raspberry Pi 3

Post date: Mar 10, 2016 12:23:33 PM

Earlier I tried running Octane 2 on the new Raspberry Pi 3 in both Firefox and Chromium installed on Ubuntu Mate. Unfortunately during execution Octane became unresponsive several times and whilst it failed on Chromium the result of 2725 achieved on Firefox is probably spurious.

So following up on a suggestion that Raspbian might be more stable than Ubuntu Mate I re-created an SD card using Raspbian Jessie which is the Pi Foundation’s officially supported operating system and is a full desktop image based on Debian Jessie.

The browser in Raspbian is Epiphany so comparing Octane scores between Chrome/Chromium, Firefox and now Epiphany might be questionable. However the Raspbian OS can be run on both the Raspberry Pi Zero and the Raspberry Pi 3 so a direct comparison is both feasible and relevant.

The SD card was first used to boot the Raspberry Pi Zero and running Octane 2 took surprising long at nearly 45 minutes to produce a result of 111:

The SD card was then transferred to the Raspberry Pi 3 and the Octane 2 run was a lot quicker producing a result of 515:

Although the 'inxi' command was used to provide an overview of each system's hardware after running the Octane test the most noticeable difference besides the number of cores was the time taken for Octane to complete:

With a price comparison of around $5 vs $40 the Octane 2 scores are most likely aligned to what you'd expect.