Operations 6 min read

64‑Bit Raspberry Pi OS vs 32‑Bit: Benchmarks Show Up to 1380% Performance Boost

A comprehensive Phoronix benchmark on a Raspberry Pi 400 reveals that the new 64‑bit Raspberry Pi OS consistently outperforms its 32‑bit counterpart, delivering performance gains ranging from modest single‑digit improvements to massive jumps of over 1300% depending on the workload.

Liangxu Linux

Feb 28, 2022

64‑Bit Raspberry Pi OS vs 32‑Bit: Benchmarks Show Up to 1380% Performance Boost

Background

The Raspberry Pi Foundation released a 64‑bit version of Raspberry Pi OS. A 64‑bit OS can better exploit the 64‑bit ARM Cortex‑A72 CPU, address more than 4 GB of RAM, and improve multimedia processing.

Test Environment

Benchmarks were run on a Raspberry Pi 400 with identical hardware and software configurations, differing only in OS bitness (32‑bit vs 64‑bit).

CPU: Broadcom BCM2711 quad‑core Cortex‑A72 (ARM v8) 1.8 GHz

Memory: 4 GB LPDDR4‑3200

Storage: 16 GB SanDisk

Video decode: H.265 (4K @ 60 fps), H.264 (1080p @ 60 fps), OpenGL ES 3.0

Linux kernel 5.10 was used for all tests.

Benchmark Results

WebP Image Encoding

Using cwebp, the 64‑bit OS was 4.5 %–7 % faster than the 32‑bit version under both default and maximum‑quality settings.

GraphicsMagick Tests

Significant gains were observed in several image‑processing tasks. The 64‑bit OS was about 47 % faster in HWB color‑space conversion, 32 % faster in swirl operations, and 17 %–28 % faster in rotation, sharpening, and Gaussian‑noise processing.

Audio Encoding

In FLAC encoding, the 64‑bit OS reduced processing time by roughly 17 %. For LAME MP3 encoding, the speedup was about 43 %.

Stress‑NG System Stress Test

Stress‑NG scores (higher is better) showed dramatic improvements: Vector Math performance increased by ~232 % and Glibc C string functions by ~196 % on the 64‑bit system.

Language Runtime Benchmarks

Python’s PyBench showed a ~13 % speedup, while PHPBench reported a ~54 % improvement on the 64‑bit OS.

Sysbench CPU/Memory Test

The Sysbench benchmark, which stresses CPU and memory, demonstrated the most dramatic gain: the 64‑bit configuration was about 1380 % faster than the 32‑bit one.

Overall Findings

Across a representative subset of dozens of benchmarks, the 64‑bit Raspberry Pi OS delivered an average performance increase of roughly 48 % compared with the 32‑bit version. Certain workloads, especially those that are CPU‑bound or heavily use 64‑bit arithmetic, saw gains exceeding 1300 %.