Four years after the launch of the first Raspberry Pi, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has just announced the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B.

The Raspberry Pi 3 will replace the Pi 2 in the current lineup, landing at the same price point that the headline model has always occupied.

Here, we'll go through what's new in terms of appearance and specifications, and then go through some benchmarks comparing the new Raspberry Pi 3 to the Pi 2 and Pi Zero.

What's new

Outwardly, the changes in the Raspberry Pi 3 might seem modest but, as you'll see from the benchmarks later, it shows an impressive jump in performance over last year's model.

The new SoC is the BCM2837, a quad-core 1.2GHz 64-bit ARMv8-A Cortex-A53 (up from a quad-core 900 MHz ARMv7 in the Pi 2) which, at face value, should represent a jump of about a 33% in performance.

Video and 3D performance has also seen a bump with the VideoCore being clocked at 400MHz for video processing (up from 250MHz) and the 3D graphics processor running at 300MHz (up from 250MHz).

One of the most welcome changes will be the addition of onboard WiFi and Bluetooth. The WiFi is compatible with 2.4GHz 802.11 b/g/n networks and the Bluetooth 4.1 supports BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) both are supplied by the BCM43438.

Elsewhere, everything is pretty much the same as the Pi 2. There's the 4 USB 2.0 ports, 10/100 ethernet, HDMI port, combined 3.5mm analog audio and composite video jack, CSI and DSI connectors for cameras and displays respectively, the microSD slot (which is now not spring-loaded), and the same 40 GPIO pins.

Format

Visually, you'd be forgiven for not being able to distinguish the Raspberry Pi 3 from the Raspberry Pi 2 (see below: Pi 2 top, Pi 3 bottom), but there are a couple of subtle changes.

The combined WiFi/Bluetooth ceramic antenna package sits just above the DSI connector (the white rectangle) which means that the run header has moved across between the GPIO pins and the USB jacks like on the Pi Zero. The power and activity LEDs have also moved from top left to bottom left, again to accommodate the WiFi/Bluetooth, which may be a problem if your case uses light guides.

The Raspberry Pi logo has also moved from the left of the SoC to just above it.

Because of the slight tweaks to the layout, we've designed a new Pibow 3 case for Raspberry Pi 3 coming in both Coupé and full-size versions.

Benchmarks

All of the benchmarks below were carried out with just a USB keyboard and mouse connected with power supplied from the official Raspberry Pi Power Supply, with the exception of the WiFi dongle test in which the USB WiFi dongle was also connected. The Pis were naked, i.e. not in a Pibow, except for the onboard WiFi in Pibow test.

Boot time

As you'll see below, boot time for the Raspberry Pi 3 is slightly faster than the Pi 2 (17.31 seconds versus 18.40 seconds) and significantly faster than the single core Pi Zero which boots in 29.96 seconds.

The very modest speed up is likely due to the fact that booting is heavily I/O bound so the extra processor grunt can't improve things much over the Raspberry Pi 2.

CPU benchmarks

The CPU in the Raspberry Pi 3 is a quad-core 1.2GHz compared with the quad-core 900MHz of the Pi 2 and single-core 1GHz of the Pi Zero.

By the numbers, the Raspberry Pi 3 should represent a roughly 33% jump on the Pi 2 (allowing for clock speed alone) and completely blow away the Pi Zero.

The benchmark we used here was Sysbench, computing primes up to 20,000. This is a heavily CPU bound test and, as such, ideal for comparing the three SoCs without side-effects from the memory or GPU.

sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 --num-threads X run

For single threaded performance (the only test where Pi Zero is compared), the Raspberry Pi 3 is 61% faster than the Pi 2 and a whopping 100% faster than the Pi Zero - and this only using a single core remember!

In two, three, and four-core setups the Raspberry Pi 3 consistently performs around 60% faster than the Pi 2.

Temperature

In terms of CPU temperature, the Raspberry Pi 3 runs significantly hotter than the Pi 2. We used the following to measure peak CPU temperature while primes were being computed.
