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Mathematica slow down on Raspberry Pi 3

david p
Posted 10 years ago

Just benchmarked my RPI3 vs RPI2 Model B V1.1 with the built in Mathematica Benchmark[]. I was quite surprised to see the benchmark significantly decline. RPI3 had benchmark of 0.03 and time of 465 while the RPI2 had benchmark of 0.045 and time of 305 sec. On the RPI3, two tests dominated the time, matrix multiply and solving linear systems which took only slightly less than the entire benchmark on RPI2. Both systems were fully updated. I wonder if Wolfram could comment on this : do they feel it is the hardware or this might be improved in a future release?. As it is it is difficult to use Mathematica on an RPI and I was looking to RPI3 to improve this. Thanks
POSTED BY: david p
13 Replies
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Here's my enthusiastic vote for making 10.0.2 the default distribution until 10.0.3 is ready.

Face it. Mathematica is a tough sell on Raspberry Pi, and this isn't making it any easier.

Cheers, Fred Klingener
POSTED BY: Fred Klingener
david p
david p
Posted 10 years ago

Thanks. Thats at least two votes now. Its clear that the RPI is really making progress with the hardware. I would hope that Mathematica would advance with it. The RPI 3 is great and let's put it to good use.
POSTED BY: david p
david p
david p
Posted 10 years ago
POSTED BY: david p
Dan M
Dan M
Posted 10 years ago

There's a Raspberry Pi 3? I never saw anything on the tech review sites.
POSTED BY: Dan M
Michael Steffen
Michael Steffen
Posted 10 years ago

I have no Pi 3 - but in my opinion you should install the temp-monitor to your taskbar and watch it while running Mathematica. On my slightly overclocked Pi2 some calculations bring it to temperatures around 70°C - and as the Pi 3 runs hotter, I could imagine that it possibly runs too hot and clocks down while calculating.

POSTED BY: Michael Steffen
POSTED BY: Fred Klingener
Michael Steffen
Michael Steffen
Posted 10 years ago
POSTED BY: Michael Steffen
david p
david p
Posted 10 years ago

Here are a couple of plots showing the performance as a function of frequency for Mathematica and also python3 (first 20000 digits).The procedure used the overclock menu in raspi-config. For G/L 7 Wheezy the options were 700, 800, 900, 950 and 1000. For G/L 8 Jessie the pi2 had two options 900 and 1000, and the pi3 had only 1 setting 1000. The Mathematica benchmarks significantly deteriorate for 10.3.1/Jessie. The Python benchmarks are all better for Jessie, excluding Linux as the problem.

Fig 1 Mathematica benchmarks

Fig 2 python benchmarks
POSTED BY: david p
POSTED BY: Ilian Gachevski

The general linear algebra performance has been improved considerably in the recent 11.3.0 Raspberry Pi release while still maintaining ARMv6 compatibility.

This will be reflected as a corresponding improvement in the Benchmark[] results.
POSTED BY: Ilian Gachevski
david p
david p
Posted 10 years ago

Update: I think the issue is related to Mathematica 10.3.1. I turns out the fastest benchmark on the RPI2 was collected with 10.0.2. I could not get my RPI3 to boot with older systems (NOOBS 1.4) so I built a brand new one (NOOBS 1.8). The new system works on older RPI's so I compared the same hardware and switched the SD cards out on the RPI2. Using 10.3.1 on an RPI2 I got a benchmark of 0.015 and time of 907, which is almost 2x slower than the same SD card in the RPI3. So RPI3 is faster than RPI2, but Mathematica 10.3.1 is slower than 10.0.1
POSTED BY: david p

FYI, I can replicate your results. On RPi v2 with 10.3 I get a score of 0.015 with a time of ~ 900s and the time is cut in half for the v3 with a score of 0.03. I'm pleasantly surprised that 2D graphics in a manipulate on a v3 are acceptably smooth and a 3D plot can be rotated with less lag than on a v2; however 3D graphics are still not ready for prime time on the RPi.
POSTED BY: BoB LeSuer
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