Muso, a few numbers for you - you like numbers don'tcha?


The Pi 4 at 1.5ghz has a Geekbench score of 596, roughly the same as the Core2Duo from a 2009 Mac Mini (592 for the 2.53ghz one).

If the Pi 4's CPU was overclocked to 5ghz with no other architectural changes (and assuming it wouldn't catch fire immediately), it would theoretically benchmark around 1987, or about 20% faster than a 4th gen "mobile" i7 (from the 2014 Mac Mini, Geekbench 1631). The M1 is still nearly 4x as fast as that theoretical overclocked Pi 4 or 12.5x as fast not overclocked (M1 Geekbench 7401).

The M1 also has more memory available (up to 16gb instead of up to 8gb) and faster memory (68gb/sec vs 4.5gb/sec), and the storage speed is 60x as fast as the Pi 4's micro SD card (2700-ish mb/sec vs 45-ish mb/sec), or about 8x as fast as booting the Pi4 from a USB3 SSD (350-ish mb/sec).

Then we get the top end M1 Max Macbooks - Geekbench 12330, 64gb of 400gb/sec memory, 7.4gb/sec storage - or in other words completely dwarfs my monster i9 machine...


So, my thoughts - it was 7 years between the first Pi 1 and the current Pi 4, and in that time the CPU power increased about 30x. As things tend to happen exponentially, I figure it'll be another 5-7 years before the Pi can match the power of the M1.

I work here