Introducing the Raspberry Pi 2 - Model B

Created by lady ada

https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-2-model-b

Last updated on 2023-08-29 02:44:48 PM EDT

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 Table of Contents

Overview 3

What to watch out for! 5

• What hasn't changed
• What has changed, watch out!
• New Processor
• Power Draw

How to tell if you have a Pi 2 8

• PCB Silkscreen Name
• Broadcom Logo on Processor
• RAM chip on bottom

Benchmarks & Performance Improvements 10

• Compared to other Single-Board-Computers
• nbench on Pi 2 @ 900MHz
• nbench @ 950MHz
• Sysbench tests (Compared to Pi B+)
• Web performance (Compared to Pi B+)
• SunSpider (Compared to Pi B+)
• Other tests!

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 Overview

Didn't think the Raspberry Pi could get any better? You're in for a big surprise! The
Raspberry Pi 2 Model B is out and it's amazing! With an upgraded ARMv7 multicore
processor, and a full Gigabyte of RAM, this pocket computer has moved from being a
'toy computer' to a real desktop PC

The big upgrade is a move from the BCM2835 (single core ARMv6) to BCM2836
(quad core ARMv7). The upgrade in processor types means you will see ~2x
performance increase just on processor-upgrade only. For software that can take
advantage of multiple-core processors, you can expect 4x performance on average
and for really multi-thread-friendly code, up to 7.5x increase in speed!

That's not even taking into account the 1 Gig of RAM, which will greatly improve
games and web-browser performance!

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 Best of all, the Pi 2 keeps the same shape, connectors and mounting holes as the
Raspberry Pi B+. That means that all of your HATs and other plug-in daughterboards
will work just fine. 99% of cases and accessories will be fully compatible with both
versions

Please note: The new processor on the Pi 2 means that you will need to update your
existing SD card or create a new SD card with your operating system (Raspbian, Arch,
XBMC, NooBs, etc) because you cannot plug in olderscards from a Pi 1 into a Pi 2
without upgrading with sudo apt-get upgrade on the Pi 1 first.

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 Also, any precompiled software will not work at full speed (although supposedly the
processor will be able to run it). Still, you'll likely want to have it recompiled for the
new processor! For many people, this isn't a big deal, but if you have a pre-created Pi
1 Model A+B+ card image, just be aware it won't work without performing an 'sudo apt-
get upgrade' on the older Pi 1 before installing on the Pi 2!

What to watch out for!

Watch out, the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B is VERY different from the Raspberry Pi
Model B - check for that "2" when checking accessories and compatibility!

The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B looks *a lot* like a Raspberry Pi Model B+! Look for
the chip on the bottom to identify the Pi 2

What hasn't changed

The basic form-factor of the Pi 2 Model B is nearly 100% the same as the Pi model B+

• The shape and size of the PCB is the same

• The 4 mounting holes are in the same location and are the same size

• The USB, Ethernet, A/V, HDMI, micro SD and microUSB connectors are int the
same exact locations and are the same size

• The Camera, Display and 40-pin GPIO connectors are in the same exact
locations and are the same size

The physical changes include:

• Processor chip is larger, has moved slightly

• The RAM is now soldered onto the bottom of the board (no longer PoP)
• Other components and chips are moved around slightly to make space for the
larger processor and RAM chip on bottom

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 This means that 99% of cases designed for the Raspberry Pi Model B+ will work with
the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. This includes the Adafruit B+ Pi cases (http://adafru.it/
2258)

One exception is some Pibow cases which have a layer that has cutouts for the
specific location of the processor. ()Pimoroni has informed us that they will have a
new case design that is compatible with both. Check the description of any case to
make sure it is compatible with both Raspberry Pi Model B+ and Raspberry Pi 2 Model
B

What has changed, watch out!

New Processor
The processor has completely changed on the new RaspberryPi 2, instead of a ARM
v6 core chip (arm6l) the BCM2836 has been upgraded to an ARM v7 core which is a
much more powerful core

However, your existing Raspberry Pi SD card images may not work because the
firmware and kernel must be recompiled/adapted for the new processor.

If you have a Raspberry Pi 2, and you are trying to upgrade your existing SD card, you
will need to upgrade your installation. To do that, log into your Pi 1 and at a console or
terminal type in sudo apt-get upgrade to perform the upgrade procedure. You'll need
your Pi to be on the Internet to do this. Once upgraded, the card will work on both Pi 1
and Pi 2 computers

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 If you have any pre-compiled binaries that you are downloading, those will need
updating too, in order to take advantage of the speed increase. Anything where you
have access to source code can be recompiled and ought to work just fine.
Supposedly any ARMv6 software is forwards compatible with ARMv7 but we haven't
tested it for sure yet

Power Draw
Quad-core ARMv7 processor means higher current draw.

Just having the Pi 2 Model B running idle (no HDMI, graphics, ethernet or wifi just
console cable) the Pi 2 draws 200mA

With WiFi running, that adds another 170mA

If you have Ethernet instead, that adds about 40mA

When doing the heaviest computational tasks, we added about 200-250mA more
current. So if you're really using your Pi 2 and you have a WiFi dongle, expect to need
650mA @ 5V, at least. More if you have stuff connected to the GPIO connector, other
USB devices, Ethernet as well, etc!

If you're still running with a cheap 5V 700mA power supply, we really recommend
upgrading to a 5V @ 2000mA!

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 How to tell if you have a Pi 2
Since the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B looks a lot like the Raspberry Pi Model B+ you'll
want to get good at identifying which you have.

PCB Silkscreen Name

First up, you can look for the name which is near the GPIO connector:

Look for the "Raspberry Pi 2" text and you're golden!

Broadcom Logo on Processor

Since the Pi 2 does not use 'package-on-package', assembling the RAM on top of the
processor, you can easily spot the Broadcom logo on top of the quad processor

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 If you don't see the logo, or you see something like "Samsung" or "Hynix" it's a B+

RAM chip on bottom

The Pi 2 has a RAM chip that is soldered onto the bottom of the Raspberry Pi's circuit
board. The B+ does not have one at all, the RAM chip is soldered directly on the
processor. So just look for a black square chip on the bottom of the PCB. The naming
and logo on the RAM may vary depending on what company supplied the memory.

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 Benchmarks & Performance Improvements
The big reason to upgrade to a Pi 2 Model B over a classic Raspberry Pi Model B+ is
the big boost in performance

The Pi 2 has 4 processors in one chip (the B+ has only one), an ARMv7 core vs an
ARMv6, and 1 Gig of RAM vs 512 MB for the model B and B+

Those 3 improvements translate to pretty big performance increases!

OK but how much faster is the Pi 2 vs the Model B+? While it strongly depends on
what you're doing, you should see at least 85% improvement (single-core processes
that just depend on the ARMv7 vs ARMv6 upgrade. For anything that can take
advantage of multi-core processors, you can see up to 7x increase in speed!

Using the Pi as a computer feels fast and 'desktop like' - not sluggish! Particularly for
developers, compiling code on the Pi 2 is 4x faster and the extra RAM helps a lot too,
so most programs can now be compiled directly on the Pi. We still recommend our Pi
Kernel-O-Matic for cross-compiling kernels since you need a lot of space & RAM ()

Compared to other Single-Board-

Computers
You can see how the Pi 2 compares to the Arduino Yun / Beaglebone Black / Intel
Galileo by checking out this earlier comparison guide (we'll be updating the guide
shortly to add the Pi 2 numbers!) ()

We provide nbench numbers below that you can compare to the other computers
until we update that tutorial...

nbench on Pi 2 @ 900MHz
TEST : Iterations/sec. : Old Index : New Index
: : Pentium 90* : AMD K6/233*
--------------------:------------------:-------------:------------
NUMERIC SORT : 444.24 : 11.39 : 3.74
STRING SORT : 36.251 : 16.20 : 2.51
BITFIELD : 1.2604e+08 : 21.62 : 4.52
FP EMULATION : 69.824 : 33.50 : 7.73
FOURIER : 4728.6 : 5.38 : 3.02
ASSIGNMENT : 6.7648 : 25.74 : 6.68
IDEA : 1297.9 : 19.85 : 5.89
HUFFMAN : 654.5 : 18.15 : 5.80
NEURAL NET : 6.2233 : 10.00 : 4.21

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 LU DECOMPOSITION : 228.32 : 11.83 : 8.54
==========================ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS==========================
INTEGER INDEX : 19.909
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 8.599
Baseline (MSDOS*) : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
CPU : 4 CPU ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l)
L2 Cache :
OS : Linux 3.18.5-v7+
C compiler : gcc version 4.6.3 (Debian 4.6.3-14+rpi1)
libc : libc-2.13.so
MEMORY INDEX : 4.228
INTEGER INDEX : 5.607
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 4.769
Baseline (LINUX) : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38

nbench @ 950MHz
TEST : Iterations/sec. : Old Index : New Index
: : Pentium 90* : AMD K6/233*
--------------------:------------------:-------------:------------
NUMERIC SORT : 481.57 : 12.35 : 4.06
STRING SORT : 37.6 : 16.80 : 2.60
BITFIELD : 1.1826e+08 : 20.29 : 4.24
FP EMULATION : 87.4 : 41.94 : 9.68
FOURIER : 5126 : 5.83 : 3.27
ASSIGNMENT : 7.6138 : 28.97 : 7.51
IDEA : 1450.7 : 22.19 : 6.59
HUFFMAN : 705.88 : 19.57 : 6.25
NEURAL NET : 6.3669 : 10.23 : 4.30
LU DECOMPOSITION : 242.49 : 12.56 : 9.07
==========================ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS==========================
INTEGER INDEX : 21.639
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 9.082
Baseline (MSDOS*) : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
CPU : 4 CPU ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l)
L2 Cache :
OS : Linux 3.18.1-v7+
C compiler : gcc-4.7
libc : libc-2.13.so
MEMORY INDEX : 4.359
INTEGER INDEX : 6.341
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 5.037
Baseline (LINUX) : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38
* Trademarks are property of their respective holder.

For comparison-geeks, note that if you overclock the Pi 2 to 900-1000 MHz it's
essentially the same processing speed as a BeagleBone Black (also an ARMv7), but
with the improved Floating Point capabilities. There's a lot of reasons to go with a
BBB vs Pi2 so please note it's not that the Pi 2 is a 'replacement' for the BBB!

Sysbench tests (Compared to Pi B+)

Sysbench is a linux program that can do raw computational tests. It's a pure-math test,
but will tell you the 'upper bound' for speed and is good for general comparison.

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 Running on a B+ @ 700MHz with one thread, we get:

Running the test with following options:

Number of threads: 1

Doing CPU performance benchmark

Threads started!
Done.

Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 10000

Test execution summary:

total time: 523.7819s
total number of events: 10000
total time taken by event execution: 523.7231
per-request statistics:
min: 51.99ms
avg: 52.37ms
max: 54.81ms
approx. 95 percentile: 53.54ms

Threads fairness:
events (avg/stddev): 10000.0000/0.00
execution time (avg/stddev): 523.7231/0.00

And for 4 threads:

Running the test with following options:

Number of threads: 4

Doing CPU performance benchmark

Threads started!
Done.

Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 10000

Test execution summary:

total time: 523.1061s
total number of events: 10000
total time taken by event execution: 2091.9841
per-request statistics:
min: 162.66ms
avg: 209.20ms
max: 252.29ms
approx. 95 percentile: 232.33ms

Threads fairness:
events (avg/stddev): 2500.0000/1.22
execution time (avg/stddev): 522.9960/0.04

Note that both tests take 523 seconds, because the B+ is a single-core processor,
there is no improvement for having 4 threads vs 1 (all 4 threads are one one
processor)

In comparison, the Pi 2 at 900 MHz has for a single thread:

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 Running the test with following options:
Number of threads: 1

Doing CPU performance benchmark

Threads started!
Done.

Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 10000

Test execution summary:

total time: 298.6816s
total number of events: 10000
total time taken by event execution: 298.6632
per-request statistics:
min: 29.64ms
avg: 29.87ms
max: 44.60ms
approx. 95 percentile: 32.14ms

Threads fairness:
events (avg/stddev): 10000.0000/0.00
execution time (avg/stddev): 298.6632/0.00

298 seconds vs 523 for a single thread, so even without taking advantage of
multicore, there's a 523/298 = 75% increase. That's nearly double just by having a
ARMv7 doing the computation

If running with 4 threads, one on each processor, we see another big improvement

Number of threads: 4

Doing CPU performance benchmark

Threads started!
Done.

Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 10000

Test execution summary:

total time: 76.1168s
total number of events: 10000
total time taken by event execution: 304.4156
per-request statistics:
min: 29.65ms
avg: 30.44ms
max: 63.32ms
approx. 95 percentile: 34.97ms

Threads fairness:
events (avg/stddev): 2500.0000/7.38
execution time (avg/stddev): 76.1039/0.01

because we could split the work over 4 cores, we sped up 4x to 76 seconds.

Compared to a model B+, the Pi 2 is at most 7x faster when using multi-threaded/core

computation!

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 Web performance (Compared to Pi B+)
When using the Pi 2 for desktop use such as running Scratch, minecraft, or web-
browsing, it feels much faster. But, that's pretty subjective and we wanted to have
some Real Numbers for comparison so we ran a few web-browser Javascript tests.

Javascript is fairly processor-intensive and runs a huge amount of the interactivity of

websites, so speedy Javascript will translate directly to speedy browsing!

The first test we did is called Octane, you can run it by visiting here () - it runs in your
webbrowser and does a series of tests.

On a B+, we actually couldn't get the test to finish without crashing, but before it
crashed we got the following:

Compare to the Pi 2 which did at least finish and gave us these numbers:

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 Higher numbers are better in this case

You can tell that depending on the tests, the Pi 2 is at least 2x as fast, and in most
cases is 4x as fast.

SunSpider (Compared to Pi B+)

Another test you can run is called SunSpider (), it's also a Javascript benchmarker.
Here's the results from running it on a B+

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total: 9477.4ms +/- 0.4%
--------------------------------------------

3d: 1657.4ms +/- 0.9%

cube: 552.5ms +/- 0.5%
morph: 316.1ms +/- 0.7%
raytrace: 788.8ms +/- 1.8%

access: 482.1ms +/- 0.6%

binary-trees: 80.6ms +/- 1.6%
fannkuch: 203.0ms +/- 1.3%
nbody: 133.7ms +/- 0.8%
nsieve: 64.8ms +/- 3.2%

bitops: 225.2ms +/- 0.3%

3bit-bits-in-byte: 20.1ms +/- 1.1%
bits-in-byte: 38.5ms +/- 2.4%
bitwise-and: 51.1ms +/- 1.5%
nsieve-bits: 115.5ms +/- 0.7%

controlflow: 74.0ms +/- 1.2%

recursive: 74.0ms +/- 1.2%

crypto: 647.4ms +/- 2.9%

aes: 337.7ms +/- 2.0%
md5: 171.7ms +/- 5.4%
sha1: 138.0ms +/- 3.6%

date: 1503.9ms +/- 0.6%

format-tofte: 784.9ms +/- 0.8%
format-xparb: 719.0ms +/- 0.8%

math: 431.4ms +/- 1.7%

cordic: 104.7ms +/- 2.0%
partial-sums: 238.2ms +/- 2.4%
spectral-norm: 88.5ms +/- 2.6%

regexp: 174.8ms +/- 1.2%

dna: 174.8ms +/- 1.2%

string: 4281.2ms +/- 0.5%

base64: 208.6ms +/- 1.6%
fasta: 466.5ms +/- 3.7%
tagcloud: 711.4ms +/- 0.9%
unpack-code: 2436.8ms +/- 0.4%
validate-input: 457.9ms +/- 0.9%

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 And running on a Pi 2:

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total: 2476.9ms +/- 0.7%
--------------------------------------------

3d: 499.8ms +/- 2.6%

cube: 141.7ms +/- 1.4%
morph: 150.5ms +/- 6.1%
raytrace: 207.6ms +/- 2.1%

access: 190.6ms +/- 1.0%

binary-trees: 24.8ms +/- 1.2%
fannkuch: 90.8ms +/- 1.0%
nbody: 48.1ms +/- 2.2%
nsieve: 26.9ms +/- 3.9%

bitops: 100.6ms +/- 1.3%

3bit-bits-in-byte: 8.4ms +/- 4.4%
bits-in-byte: 19.4ms +/- 1.9%
bitwise-and: 25.8ms +/- 1.2%
nsieve-bits: 47.0ms +/- 2.0%

controlflow: 25.6ms +/- 3.0%

recursive: 25.6ms +/- 3.0%

crypto: 194.5ms +/- 1.3%

aes: 99.6ms +/- 0.7%
md5: 52.3ms +/- 4.2%
sha1: 42.6ms +/- 0.9%

date: 303.5ms +/- 1.2%

format-tofte: 154.4ms +/- 0.8%
format-xparb: 149.1ms +/- 1.7%

math: 141.5ms +/- 1.0%

cordic: 39.1ms +/- 1.0%
partial-sums: 69.9ms +/- 1.0%
spectral-norm: 32.5ms +/- 1.6%

regexp: 90.0ms +/- 0.7%

dna: 90.0ms +/- 0.7%

string: 930.8ms +/- 0.7%

base64: 57.6ms +/- 1.0%
fasta: 141.2ms +/- 0.7%
tagcloud: 160.7ms +/- 0.6%
unpack-code: 460.6ms +/- 1.0%
validate-input: 110.7ms +/- 1.0%

In this case, lower numbers are better. Again, you can see that all tests are at least 2x
faster on a Pi 2 vs a B+ and most are about 4x faster!

Other tests!
OK we'll be doing more tests, but one thing we did get going was playing around with
emulators. Of course the Pi 2 is much speedier than the B+ and by overclocking to

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 900 MHz we could run pcsx (playstation 1 emulator) and Crash Bandicoot at full speed
with HDMI audio! Simply download, build and run as per this tutorial ().

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