Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W review - 5x faster for just $5 more

hello my name's gary sims and this is gary explained to the raspberry pi foundation have done the simulink possible they've released a new version of the raspberry pi zero called the raspberry pi zero two w and it increases the performance by up to five times and yet they haven't changed the board size absolutely amazing if you want to find out more please let me explain okay so i'm going to cover lots of different things about the raspberry pi zero two in this video some of it is gonna be history some of it's gonna be background which means you may want to jump over parts so therefore there is a chapter list in the description below and if google has done its job right you should have them also here on the video okay let's crack on okay so for those who don't know what the raspberry pi is it is a single board computer aimed at hobbyists enthusiasts and makers and the great thing about it is that you get a full uh functioning computer that means you've got a multi-core processor on it you've got ram you've got bluetooth wi-fi but also as well of all that stuff you've also got access to what's called the gpio pins the general input output pins which means you then have access to hardware to sensors to motors to controllers to wireless things to displays leds you can control all kinds of hardware and therefore build some really quite interesting projects now traditional raspberry price single board these are kind of large credit card size devices we've had the raspberry pi one the two the three and now the four and the four is quite an amazing device with a quad core cortex a72 processor up to eight gigabytes of ram usb wi-fi bluetooth uh there's even access to the pci express bus under certain versions of it you've got the pi 400 the kind of the same thing built in with the keyboard i've got videos about all these things here on this channel but at that high end i mean you can be paying you know 80 90 for a raspberry pi 4 with eight gigabytes of ram now way down the other end the raspberry pi foundation released the raspberry pi zero back in 2015 and it's much much smaller than the traditional raspberry pi boards in fact it's really really quite amazing that are able to pack in so much on such a small board now the raspberry pi zero if i'm being honest is my preferred my absolute favorite board because of its price and yet its capabilities and you can literally just plug one into a usb charger hang it on a wall stick it on the on a table somewhere and over the wi-fi you've got access to a full linux computer with desktop and wi-fi and bluetooth all those gpio pins and it's just five dollars for the cheapest one and it's ten dollars for the one with the built-in wi-fi and everything's absolutely amazing i've got too many of them let's just put it like that i've got too many now i actually spoke to ebden upton that's the founder of the raspberry pi foundation back in 2020 at the arm dev summit and i asked him did you have any plans for the raspberry pi zero and he said no not at the moment because the biggest problem with the raspberry pi zero is it's such a such a small board that it's very hard to get the ram and the processor and all the wi-fi and the gpio pins and the hdmi and the usb you know all on that tiny tiny board well obviously they were working on something because they've brought out now the raspberry pi zero two and it all comes down to the packaging how they managed to get the ram and that quad core processor in that little package and we'll talk more about that in a moment so now turning our attentions to the raspberry pi zero two w itself let's let's first look at the name raspberry pi over enough zero because it is a raspberry pi zero so that's much smaller ball two because it's the second uh generation and the w means it's got wireless connectivity built into it now there's no mention whether they're going to release ever a raspberry pi zero two without the w which could be a cheaper version without those extra components on it no news wouldn't surprise me if they did at some point in the future let's take a quick look at the specs basically it has the same system on a chip as the raspberry pi 3 but it's slightly lower clock speed at one gigahertz and the magic here is all in the packaging which as i said we'll talk about in a minute so that raspberry pi 3 and the raspberry pi zero two have a quad-core 64-bit arm cortex a53 processor in this case clocked at one gigahertz and you have 512 megabytes of lpddr2 ram in that same package you've got 2.4 gigahertz wi-fi for you've got bluetooth 4.2 including bluetooth low energy you've got a usb 2.0 interface then of course there are those gpio pins which are exactly compatible with all the other raspberry pi devices which you can use any kind of hats hardware attachments on top that you can kind of use on the raspberry pi you can use on here the micro sd card slot mini hdmi port and then of course you've got a camera connector there are some solder points for a composite video and because of the way the raspberry pi works because of that gpu got inside of it as with the other robot hours you do actually have uh in code and d code for h.264 hardware accelerated so that's really good and then if it was ever necessary opengl es 1.1 and 2.2 2.0 sorry graphics so while all that's fantastic let's just point out a few of the negative points half a gigabyte of ram that's the point here and if you want more than one g half a gigabyte go for one gigabyte in a raspberry pi 3 and if you need more than one gigabyte then go and get a raspberry pi four two gigabytes four gigabytes eight gigabyte versions available however for that tiny tiny package that is the raspberry pi zero two i think half a gigabyte is great and obviously the best way to use it is without the desktop running maybe you want the desktop running for some kind of initial configuration but then really if you're putting it in some kind of project in a robot in a temperature monitoring a smart home stuff displays whatever you're doing it'd be good running it without the desktop however having said that when i did run it with the desktop this kind of a side note it was only using about 150 200 megabytes of that 512 ram with no applications running so it's not actually that much of a hog a memory hog when you do have the desktop running another thing to mention about the raspberry pi zeros in general is it's got all the tiny connectors on it so the hdmi port is not a full size one so you have to have an adapter to go from that to a normal hdmi cable and in fact most of the places that sell raspberry pi boards raspberry pi zero boards will sell you kind of little conversion kits that include the adapter for the hdmi and the same for the usb it's not a full size usb port like you'd get on a raspberry pi 4. it's a mini one and again you have to have an adapter if you want to plug in a flash drive or a hard drive or a webcam or something you're going to have to use adapter so adapters really are the the big thing even a keyboard and mouse you're going to need an adapter and a little hub to get that plugged into the raspberry pi zero now that's the negative points but again once you have it up and running and you are using it in a project or as i often do just leave it running uh here in my office so that i can connect to it over the network and then start using a linux computer instantaneously of course you don't need the mouse keyboard and hdmi connected but you will need them for configuration now i said we'll talk about that package now with the original raspberry pi 1 and the raspberry pi zero you've basically got this thing it's called a package on a package pop what that basically means you can get the system on a chip and it's kind of a the whole package with the little ball bearings the little ball solder points that is how it's connected to the the motherboard and then on top of that you can actually place some sd ram as long as the processor is small enough to fit between the the ball points from those legs that connect it to the um to the motherboard here's a little diagram to help us understand that so here you can see it says processor dram you know and then the substrate and the solder balls therefore but the point to notice here is the balls that are underneath the dram they sit on top of the ones that go into the processor so really it's actually two physical packages that are one on top of each other and then of course it's all joined together and soldered together and everything but really you're just looking at two things one sitting on top of the other so i said the key there is that the processor needs to be able to fit in the gap between all those connecting balls that are part of the sd ram now it was fine for an arm v6 single core processor which is what you get in the pi one what you get in the raspberry pi zero however as soon as you move up to a cortex a7 or a cortex a53 so 32 bit and then 64 bit that processor becomes too big and no longer fits in there and that's why the raspberry pi zero was using that arm v6 core if you wanna know about arm v6 on v7 rv8 on v9 i've got loads of videos here on this channel about that so do go and check them out now once you've moved to the bigger process there's no longer the gap so they have to choose a different solution that different solution is called a system in a package or a sip so looking here a diagram of a cipa system in a package you can see it's no longer two rows of solder balls two rows of connecting pins it's actually just one and it's all inside the same package and inside the package inside that you've got the ram and the processor and they can actually now sit on top of each other one doesn't have to sort of fit nestle into the bottom part of the other it can be bigger and they can go on top of each other and so the new processor that you find on the raspberry pi zero two w is actually this combined package of the sd ram and the process together in that one physical package and then that in itself is then connected to the motherboard and that's absolutely brilliant that's also why you have 512 megabytes of ram and not one gigabyte or two gigabytes and so on so let's talk about performance well first of all the most obvious thing is that the raspberry pi zero had an arm v6 single core processor in it and now we're going up to 32 bit one and now we're going up to a 64-bit quad-core cortex a53 processor running at one gigahertz so just that in itself is just going to absolutely blow the performance numbers out of the window now what i've done is i've done some various testing comparing different raspberry pi's for their performance using single threaded calculations and multi-threaded calculations i've done them using my thread test tool that's available on my github repository if you want to try out for yourself and i've also used uh the open ssl uh package for creating doing md5 and sha1 and cryptographic functions to see how well they perform and that's kind of single threaded as well so single-stranded multi-threaded and let's have a look at what i found out so on the left hand side we can see here at the very top we've got the pi zero w it's the original one we've got the pi zero two w got the pi three and the pi four and all of these scores are relative to the speed of the pi zero w with its single core 32-bit arm v6 core so let's just start at the bottom let's look at the pi 4 for example using multi uh threaded primes for example you can see look at that it's 9.5 almost 10 times faster than a pi zero w you can see that a pi 3 is like eight times faster and when we get to the new one the pi zero two w you can see it's over five times faster doing multi-threaded uh prime functions uh finding prime numbers using my uh test program as i said that's on my github in a review environment absolutely amazing and yet the price is only going up by five dollars so five times faster for five dollars more i don't think really that's uh that's a bad message really is it and let's just look at some of the single core stuff on my single threaded prime number finder you can see that the pi zero two is about 1.4 times faster than a pi zero and then the pi 3 is about two times faster now it's interesting because the pi zero two and the pi three have the same cortex a53 quad core setup but of course the pi three is clocked at a higher clock rate and therefore you can see the difference and of course when you get to the pi 4 with a much much better quartus a72 you're looking at 2.5 times performance and then looking at the single threaded sha 1 generation numbers again pi zero is our base they're one times you've got a pi zero two is two point five times more than two point five times four times faster for the pi three and over six times faster for the pi four so one thing it's absolutely certain the pi uh02 is phenomenal in terms of performance compared to the original pi zero and of course it's up there with the pi 3. so if that's the level of performance you're looking for then the pi zero two is a great bargain at only fifteen dollars but of course with uh performance there's also the question of power power also means how much you know amps it's using so also how much heat it's generating so i did a bit of testing between the pi zero two and the pi three to see what the story was there so basically i've gone back to having two different workloads here a single threaded one and a multiple threaded one the pi zero two w in a single threaded test creating uh sha1 uh uh hashes will use just over 0.3 of an amp and when it's running using my multi-thread four threads on my testing program then that goes up to about half an amp now you compare that to the pi 3 the pi 3 will use over 0.6 amps when using the single threaded hash generator and it goes up to almost one amp 0.95 amp around there when it's doing multi-threaded prime so you can see there's much more power being used by the pi 3 than there is by the pi zero w and of course you'd expect that because of the difference in the clock speed so the clock speed much much lower on the pi zero higher on the pi 3. now of course this is the question this is how it works basically the pi 3 can do the work in a shorter amount of time but use more current to do that the pi zero can use less current but it takes longer to perform the task so this is always the question of what engineers have to deal with when they're trying to make power efficient devices you can either do something quickly and use lots of power but then of course you come back down to zero very quickly because you've finished the job or you can use not quite so much power but take longer to do it which means it takes longer before you go back down to zero power usage again now the great thing is that when you do the multiplications it actually turns out the pi uh zero two is more efficient than the pi three even though it takes longer the amount of energy it uses in total including over that time frame is fractionally less than the pi so it's not much in it but there is a little bit of a difference there so if you wanted something there's more power efficient then go with the pi zero two okay let's quickly just talk about software as with all the pi boards it runs by default uh raspberry pi os it's the 32-bit version that's running at the moment all my testing was done on the 32-bit version now because it's only got 512 megabytes of ram there is a compelling argument for sticking with the 32-bit version i didn't yet try a 64-bit version because the 64-bit version of ubuntu that runs on the pi 2 you pi 0-2 you need to do some hacking you need to install it on one board and then copy it over and then the configuration as i didn't do it now the right the ubuntu people are saying that there will be a 64-bit version coming fully supported very soon for the pi zero two when that comes out i will take a look and see if there's anything very interesting to say about it if there is then i certainly will make another video but just to re-emphasize it is a 64-bit processor so if you are keen on running 64-bit uh software then there will be 64-bit versions of linux available for it and of course you can compile native 64-bit apps for it and finally let's just talk about the price as i've said 15 in the usa in europe you're looking around 15 pounds 14 pounds in the uk sort of 15 euros 14 euros 13 euros in europe depending on where you buy it and then packaging for shipping and all that kind of stuff but basically if you stick to the u.s pricing because it's quite interesting five dollars for the pi zero ten dollars for the pi zero w and fifteen dollars for the pi zero two w and i must say the pi zero two w is now my favorite raspberry pi device because of that price and the performance and the form factor are you know they're only going to ship because of the you know problems with the chip shortage they reckon they're going to ship maybe 200 000 units this year and then maybe another 250 000 in the first half of next year i mustn't be greedy but i'm certainly gonna be getting hold of a few more of those okay that's it my name is gary sims this is guy explains i really hope you enjoyed this video if you did please do give it a thumbs up if you like these kind of videos then why not stick around by subscribing to the channel don't forget you can follow me on twitter at gary explained and i also have a newsletter go over to gary explains.com type in your email address you won't get any spam but you will get the newsletter and i think you might enjoy it okay that's it i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Gary Explains

Views: 38,897

Keywords: Gary Explains, Tech, Explanation, Tutorial, Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, system in package, SiP, package on package, PoP, tiny $15 computer, RP3A0, Broadcom BCM2710A1, Cortex-A53, Arm Cortex-A53, Linux, Raspberry Pi OS, Raspbian, quad-core, Armv8, 64-bit, 64-bit Arm

Id: XHNFlAN5w7g

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 08 2021