Look what the mailman brought: It’s a shiny (or maybe matte?) BeagleBone Black, freshly arrived (actually it’s been over a month, but time sure flies…) from Newark element14! I’ve been doing Raspberry Pi related hacking for a while, but especially when the Pi was still fresh and new, I did from time to time consider if the grass would be greener on other side of the fence. Or blacker, in this case, as I mean BeagleBone Black.
BeagleBone was long very much more powerful than Raspberry Pi, but now that Pi2 has come out, price and specification-wise they are closer than ever. A quick personal comparison chart:
| BeagleBone Black | Raspberry Pi 2 (B) | Price | 46 € (Element14) | 32 € (Element14) |
|---|---|---|
| Processor | 1GHz single-core Cortex-A8 | 0.9GHz quad-core Cortex-A7 |
| Memory | 512MB DDR3 | 1GB |
| Connections | USB host, USB device, micro-HDMI | 4x USB, HDMI, 3.5mm Audio/analog video |
| GPIO | 2x 46 pin headers (65 digital I/O) | 40 GPIO pins (26 digital I/O) |
| Other | 4GB integrated flash, works as USB device | camera and display interface on board |
When Pi1 was out, the BeagleBone Black with the more modern Cortex-A8 chip and higher clockrate was definitely the more powerful, but now with 4-core Pi2, the tables have somewhat turned. Still, the clockrate is higher and there’s more GPIO. And speaking of GPIO, my Raspberry Pi vs. Pi2 GPIO benchmark has gotten a lot of interest, so I thought the best way to take this black beauty for a test drive would be to benchmark BeagleBone Black GPIO in a similar way.
Test setup
The test subject is the most recent revision C of BeagleBone Black. I followed the (a bit lacking in detail and readability) Getting Started guide and downloaded the latest Debian Jessie image (8.3, 2016-01-24), flashed it to card and ran apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade (2016-04-14).
