Some Raspberry Pi 2 Benchmarks

This article presents a few informal benchmarks comparing the Raspberry Pi to the Raspberry Pi 2. The original Pi has a single core ARM v6 processor. The Pi 2 is quad core, ARM v7, and clocked faster than the Pi 1. But is it really six times as fast, as the makers claim ? Short answer: yes it is. And then some. Continue reading

An Example of Parallel Processing

This post shows how to use parallel processing to get a CPU intensive job done faster in Unix/Linux. By splitting a large task into several parts, it is quite easy to give each part to a separate CPU, and complete the task many times faster than it would on a single processor.

These days, even small PCs and other devices often come equipped with several CPU cores. But some tasks will use only one core, sometimes using 100% of it, while other cores stand by idle. Sometimes this is a waste of resources. Continue reading