In this video I am going to do a speed comparison
between the Raspberry Pi Pico and the ESP32 S2 board, two of the most powerful and inexpensive
boards for makers. Before running the computation speed benchmark,
I have developed, let’s take a quick look at the most basic specs of each board to get
a sense of what to expect. The Raspberry Pico board features two 32-bit
Arm Cortex M0+ cores operating at 133Mhz. It also offers 264KBs of RAM memory and 2MB
of Flash memory and it costs at the time of this recording around $7. The Lilygo ESP32 S2 Board on the other hand
features a single-core 32-bit LX7 microcontroller operating at 240MHz. It also offers 320KBs of RAM memory and 4MBs
of Flash memory. Its price today is around $8. So, based on the specifications, we can conclude
that the ESP32 S2 is faster than the Raspberry Pi Pico in single-core workloads. How much faster is the question? We can't know without running a benchmark,
because the boards employ processors with different architectures. Based on the operating frequencies of each
board, we can estimate that the ESP32 S2 single core performance will be roughly 80% faster
than the Raspberry Pi Pico's single core performance. Is this correct? I wanted to find out, so I created a simple
but computationally intensive test that could run on both boards. Both boards will execute the same CircuitPython
application, which will display a splash screen for two seconds before starting to calculate
the Pi for 1500 iterations of a Pi approximation algorithm. Both boards will show the results on a 1.8"
Color TFT display. Which board will complete the task the fastest? Let’s find out. I am going to power up the board at the same
time using this power bank. As you can see, the ESP32 S2 board performed
the computation in approximately 3.13 seconds, whereas the Raspberry Pi Pico required 6.48
seconds. The bootup time of the Raspberry Pi Pico is
slightly shorter, but this time is not counted in the benchmark; only the Pi's calculation
is counted. In single core applications, the ESP32 S2
board outperforms the Raspberry Pico board. It is approximately 107 percent faster. Percentages can be deceiving about how quick
something is, so let's run the benchmark again, but this time I'll remove the bootup timing
difference for better comparisons. The ESP32 S2 is twice as fast as the Raspberry
Pi Pico, and the difference is noticeable and important. Let’s now measure the power consumption
of each board while running the benchmark. The Raspberry Pi Pico and the display needs
around 45mA of current while running the script, while the ESP32 S2 and the display needs around
77mA of current. The display needs around 20mAs so we have
around 25mAs of current for the Raspberry Pi Pico and 57mAs of current for the ESP32
S2. So, the ESP32 S2 needs 128% more current to
run the script but for 50% less time. In total, the Raspberry Pi Pico needed 10%
less power to perform this task which in my opinion is not significant. If you're interested in the script, I'll include
a link to it in the video description so you may do your own testing. If you need more information on connecting
this display to both boards, I'll link to the thorough videos I made about it here. To summarize, the ESP32 S2 outperforms the
Raspberry Pi Pico in single core processing workloads. It costs roughly the same, is $1 more expensive,
has more RAM, Flash memory, and, of course, WiFi, which the Raspberry Pi Pico lacks. The Raspberry Pi Pico, on the other hand,
has two processing cores, but I believe that in more than 90% of our projects, the use
of a second core is unnecessary. The Raspberry Pi Pico has a significant edge
in terms of popularity and excellent documentation, which makes development considerably easier. So, which board should you use? Whatever board best matches your requirements. If you need computing power, the ESP32 S2
is the fastest board available for less than $10. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this comparison
in the comments section below. Thank you for tuning in; I'll see you next
time.
