Banana Pro Review
Documentation & Third Party Books
The great thing about Linux is that it is a widely used, standard operating system.
All versions of Raspbian are basically a customized version of Debian for ARM processors, which means that other than hardware specific software, Banana Pro (and Pi) user level software is largely compatible with the Raspberry Pi.
This also means that most Unix / Linux books apply equally as well, and that Raspberry Pi books (other than those dealing with low-level Broadcom chips) will generally also be useful to Banana owners.
Due to LeMaker porting WiringPi and RPi.GPIO, most books that teach WiringPi and/or RPi.GPIO programming on the Pi will also apply to the Banana Pro (and Banana Pi).
Do note that only WiringPi and RPi.GPIO have been ported – so other libraries such as pigpio and servo blaster are NOT available on the Banana Pro or Banana Pi.
Benchmarks
Benchmarks that did not already average multiple results were run 2-4 times (depending on length of test) and averaged.
SysBench 0.4.12
| Benchmark | Raspberry Pi | Banana Pi | Banana Pi | Banana Pro | Banana Pro |
| Number of cores used | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 |
| SysBench CPU Test (seconds) | 507 | 378 | 149 | 291.6 | 147.6 |
| SysBench Memory BW (MB/s) | 88.9 | 201.7 | 426.7 | 222.4 | 422.3 |
Sysbench CPU results show total execution time in seconds for the same amount of work, which is why the CPU dual threaded results show twice the time on the single core Raspberry Pi, and half on the dual core Banana Pi.
As you can see, the Banana Pi and Banana Pro have approximately the same Sysbench performance (other than single core CPU test, which is a bit strange)
Both Banana’s significantly outperform the Raspberry Pi while using just a single core, and totally dominate it when using both cores.
iperf 2.0.5
| Benchmark | Raspberry Pi | Banana Pi | Banana Pi | Banana Pro | Banana Pro | Banana Pro |
| 100Mbps | 100Mbps | 1000Mbps | 100Mbps | 1000Mbps | WiFi | |
| iperf | 47.6 | 96.4 | 530.7 | 96.4 | 653 | 30.1 |
| iperf -w 128k | 47.6 | 94.3 | 484.0 | 94.4 | 487 | 28.1 |
Results shown are in megabits per second
The Banana Pro and Banana Pi both nearly saturate a 100Mbps network, and can use between 50%-65% of a gigabit networks potential throughput.
The Raspberry Pi has roughly half the performance the Bananas get on a 100Mbit network, and less then 10% of what the Bananas get on a gigabit network.
NBench 2.2.3
| Benchmark | Raspberry Pi | Banana Pi | Banana Pro |
| Nbench Integer Index | 11.55 | 17.65 | 20.23 |
| Nbench Floating Point Index | 3.88 | 6.93 | 8.67 |
Results are an index relative to a Pentium 90 with 256KB L2 cache.
Nbench only uses a single core, and the Bananas show about 50% more integer and almost twice the floating point performance of the Raspberry Pi.
Unix Bench 5.1.3
| Benchmark | Raspberry Pi | Banana Pi | Banana Pi | Banana Pro | Banana Pro |
| Number of cores used | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 |
| Dhrystone | 142.7 | 247.4 | 489.8 | 248.7 | 490 |
| Whetstone | 48.9 | 82.6 | 177.8 | 89.6 | 178 |
| Hanoi | 18790.9 | 33930.2 | 67120.9 | 33920.3 | 67205.1 |
Results are an index relative to a SPARCstation 20-61 (rated at 10.0).
The Banana Pro and the Banana Pi performed roughly at the same level, and they both significantly outperformed the Raspberry Pi (especially when using both cores).
hdparm & dd
| Benchmark | Raspberry Pi | Banana Pi | Banana Pro |
| hdparm cached reads | 159.6 | 332.7 | 323.4 |
| hdparm buffered reads | 19.52 | 16.65 | 16.66 |
Results are in megabytes per second.
hdparm cached reads are essentially a memory benchmark, and the Bananas win by roughly a factor of two.
For buffered reads the Raspberry Pi wins!
| Benchmark | Raspberry Pi | Banana Pi | Banana Pro | Banana Pro * |
| dd copying 128MB /dev/null | 146.0 | 358.3 | 375 | 19.2 |
| dd writing 128MB from sd image | 23.5 | 18.6 | 23.8 | 8.6 |
| dd writing 128MB from /dev/zero | 16.8 | 37.4 | 41.7 | 17.5 |
Results are in megabytes per second.
Due to 1GB of memory the Banana wins on cached disk activity, but the non-cached results favor the Raspberry Pi.
The new results for 1.5GB transfer, which is too large to be cached – showing that the previous tests that only copied 128MB were very effected by caching. I’ll have to re-run the non-Pro benchmarks with the larger file size in the near future.
Review Index
Page 1: Introduction, Does it look the same?
Page 2: Closer Look at the Banana Pro
Page 3: Feature Comparison, Operating Systems
Page 4: Software Compatibility
Page 5: WiringPi, RPi.GPIO, Hardware Compatibility
Page 6: More hardware compatibility, WiFi Configuration
Page 7: Documentation, Benchmarks
Page 8: Power Utilization, Support, Conclusion
