Rock Pi X vs Raspberry Pi 4: x86 & ARM Showdown

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers this time it's a head-to-head between the rock pi x single ball computer which has got an x8664 processor and the raspberry pi 4 which has got an arm cpu on each board i'm going to be running the same operating system which is going to be ubuntu 2010 and it'll definitely be very interesting to see which board comes out on top the x86 baseboard or the armbase board and so to start things off let's have a very quick summary of the specification of the two boards right here we have our rock pi x and our raspberry pi 4. specifically we have a four gigabyte rock pi x with 32 gigabytes of on-board flash storage on which ubuntu 2010 is installed and the raspberry pi 4 is a 4 gigabyte model fitted with a 32 gigabyte sandisk extreme pro micro sd card as it's ubuntu 2010 boot drive as you can see each board is fitted with a large passive heat sink most of the metals on the top of the pipe as it processes off the top whereas on the rock pi x most of the method is underneath because the process is on the bottom of the rock pi x and equipped as they are here both of these boards have a street price of about eighty dollars when it comes to the processor both boards have a quad-core 64-bit cpu however that's where the similarities end as the rock pi x has got an intel atom z8 350 which has a 1.44 gigahertz base frequency bursting to 1.92 gigahertz whilst the raspberry pi 4 has got a bcm 2711 system on a chip with four arm cortex a72 cores running at up to 1.5 gigahertz in terms of other specifications the rock pi x has got a single full size hdmi connector whilst the raspberry pi 4 has got twin micro hdmi connectors this said the raspberry pi 4 does win when it comes to usb ports as it's got 2 usb 3 and 2 usb 2 ports compared to one usb 3 and 3 usb 2 ports on the rock pi x and as you can see both boards also have a gigabit ethernet socket elsewise both boards have a 3.5 millimeter audio jack they've both got a 40 pin gpio connector and they're both powered by usb c so let's get both of these boards booted up and see how performance compares for these very similarly matched x86 and arm single board computers greetings here we are on the rock pie x running ubuntu 2010 otherwise known as groovy gorilla here is our groovy gorilla meanwhile here we are running the same operating system on the raspberry pi 4 where the only difference is the raspberry reflection in our wacky monkey's glasses both systems offer a pretty fluid and responsive desktop experience for example if we run up a web browser there we go you see that we have pretty similar performance although the raspberry pi 4 was very slightly faster although i don't think we'll record this as a significant test result however there are significant differences between these systems for example if we just close down the web browser here i'd note that i'm running both boards with an ethernet connection to connect them to the internet they both got a wired network connection and this is because here on the rock pi x i cannot get wi-fi working and this is consistent with my experience of my first review of the rockpix a few months ago meanwhile on the raspberry pi wi-fi works fine and if we wanted to we could therefore switch using wi-fi rather than ethernet if we wanted to now i'm sure back here on the rot pi x it would be possible eventually i guess to get wi-fi working you can see just to prove it to you here it really isn't here at the moment there must be some sort of driver available and certainly wi-fi works fine on the rockpi x when running windows 10. however i think we can reasonably state that linux driver support is better on the raspberry pi 4 than on the rock pi x and if we go across this results table we'll record a win here for the raspberry pi however when it comes to software support more generally things go in the opposite direction so for example if i go across to a ubuntu software here and run it up this is where we can install software packages and if i select for example art and design here on the rock pi x you'll see we have a lot of packages available we've got a scroll bar there across there and we can if i can grab the scroll bar why is scroll bar so ridiculous size these days anyway we scroll down here you see we've got more than two pages of results and i'm showing you this because if we go across to the raspberry pi 4 and do a similar thing we go across open up the software and open up art and design you'll see that we've got just one page of results just 24 packages here a lot fewer than we see on the rockport x and this reflects the fact that there's less desktop software available for computers with an arm processor like a raspberry pi than there is for computers with an x86 processor like a rock pi x and so if we go back to our table we have to record a win here for the rock pi x in terms of the brexit software available for the board right here i am back again with the groovy gorilla on the rock pi x where i thought we'd run a cpu test and so i've installed on both boards sysbench with the command sudo apt install sysbench and now if i run up the terminal got one running over here we'll run this sysbench cpu test and i've set this up to factor prime numbers to a value of twenty thousand threads equals four represents the fact there are four chords on both of these computers under test time equals zero means that time will not be constrained in this test it'll run for as long as it's necessary to execute 10 000 events and we'll get the time in seconds at the end of the test with the machine with the lowest score being the winner so let's run suspense like that there it goes very exciting taking a little while this should be a relatively fast test on both boards but we will see the rock pie is uh still having little think and eventually hopefully we'll give us a result come on there we are we've got a result of 17.5 seconds to run this a cis bench test running at 10 000 events so if we go across the raspberry pi 4 and we run the same test here we go i doubt it'll take quite as long as that on the raspberry pi four we also see oh there we are four pointer three seconds here on the raspberry pi four so that is clearly a very good result for the raspberry pi 4. the raspberry pi 4's modern arm processor is outperforming the few year old x86 atom processor on the rock pi x by about four times this really is i find both a very surprising and impressive result for the raspberry pi 4 and it only makes me eager to run some more performance tests right here on the rock pi x i'm now going to run up the gnu image manipulation program or do a real world test there it is i've installed it of course on both computers and it'll come up in a second it'll take a while i should have done a test of how long it took to launch shouldn't it because it's gonna be quite a long while look at things but uh let's speed on through oh no it's getting there it's getting there christopher it'll get there in a second and uh there we are we've got the package launched and what i'm going to do is to go to file and new to do a new document default size is 1920 1080 we'll use that and i'm then going to go to filters and render and lava down there and we'll now bring up the raspberry pi 4 also running and prime to run the lava filter with default settings and by the magic of filmmaking we'll start them both off at exactly the same point in time and i wonder which one will win here will we get a similar result to the suspense test or was that a particular operation and certainly things here do seem to be a lot closer yes this race is a great deal closer indeed with the rock pi x winning on 16.0 seconds very closely followed by the raspberry pi 4 on 17.3 seconds to complete applying the filter so here we have a win for the rock pi x but regardless i think this result makes it very clear but if you want to compare the performance of two computers you should never rely on just one test right i thought we'd now test rendering performance in the caden live video editor so here i am back on the rock pi x and i've brought up caden live which of course i've also installed how to do that first and i've created a very simple edit with just one 10 second clip of some docs there we are we'd like to see our docs here on explaining computers and i've set up in rendering a script to render this out if i go to render and there we are there's the script so we'll start the script here on the rock pi x and this will give us a time for completion so we'll speed on through till it's completed here we are just coming to an end now and the rock pi x has taken wait for it it'll tell us in a second come on computer there we are it's taken 35 seconds to render out this 10 second hd clip here on the rock pi x so we go across to the raspberry pi 4 and also bring up caden live all set up to run the script so let's start the script rendering out exactly the same video test and here we are coming to completion on the pi 4 what's the pi 4 going to do all the tension is killing me 36 seconds look at that 36 seconds on the raspberry pi 4 compared to 35 on the rock pi x so very very similar performance during this real world task of rendering out a video clip so i'm going to declare this particular test a time guess what here i am back again to show you a few more things and the first is going to be the system monitor running here on the rock pi x but also on the raspberry pi 4 just so you can see the kind of resources being used on both systems running along pretty much at idle they're both using about the same amount of system memory as you can see since i saw you last i've also been testing 1080p youtube playback here in firefox in ubuntu 2010 and as this split screen comparison indicates both boards deliver a passable if not stunning streaming media video performance if with the pie dropping around 50 more frames this said ubuntu 2010 is not optimized for browser-based video playback for either board so this is not really a fair reflection of potential performance and indeed the rockpi x provided much better 1080p youtube playback in windows 10 as we can see in this clip from my original review of the board meanwhile youtube playback on the raspberry pi 4 is now finally pretty good indeed in the december 2020 version of raspberry pi os as this last clip demonstrates and so i think it's reasonable to declare browser-based youtube playback as another tie if noting that in ubuntu 2010 the rockpi x does have slightly better performance in this video we've shown that an arm-based single ball computer like a raspberry pi 4 can very much hold its own against an x86 based board like a rock pi x at the same price point and to me at least that's very surprising because when i set out to make this video my expectation was that the rock pi x with its intel atom processor would blow the raspberry pi out of the water on all the performance tests and clearly this hasn't been the case and what i think we can conclude there from this is the only reason to buy a rock pi x and it can be a very good reason is if you want to run x86 based software either in linux or in windows but elsewise the raspberry pi is just as good a board in terms of its actual performance and it's got an arm processor not an x86 processor and i guess a lot of people myself very much included still have a mental model where we go x86 based processors much more powerful than arm-based processors and this is changing we know it's changing with apple now having arm-based processors the m1 and its latest macs which are competing very well against comparable intel chips in in older macs so the world of computing the wonderful world of computing is at a point of transition with the increasing rise of the arm processor but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you see there please press that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 172,733

Keywords: Raspberry Pi 4, Rock Pi X, Raspberry Pi 4 vs Rock Pi X, Rock Pi X vs Raspberry Pi 4, ARM vs x86, x86 SBC, Intel SBC, Atom SBC, Ubuntu 20.10, Raspberry Pi Ubuntu, Rock Pi X Ubuntu, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, Sysbench, GIMP, Kdenlive

Id: VYkRpLTEp-w

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021