Benchmarking development systems


I quite like performant systems - lots of CPU, memory and storage. When I want to compare overall performance between systems then I usually run a build of the raspberrypi4_64 image when using buildroot

Today I am comparing three systems. One is an AMD 5950X with 128GB RAM and 2TB Samsung 980 Pro, the next an older Corsair One with an Intel i7-8700K, 32GB RAM and a 512GB PCIe v3.0 NVMe and finally an Azure VM, Standard D2s v3 (2 vcpus, 8 GiB memory) with 64GB of Standard SSD.

The OS on them is Ubuntu/Debian. On the AMD it’s Ubuntu 22.04LTS under WSL2 in Windows 11, the Intel has a native installation of Debian 12 and the Azure VM is running Ubuntu 20.04LTS.

To start you need to install the build tools. This can be done running:

sudo apt install build-essential git zip

Then you can clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/buildroot/buildroot cd buildroot

To rule out internet connection speed for downloading the source code there is a make command you can run to download all the code, we first have to define which config we want to use and after set off the build:

make raspberrypi4_64_defconfig make source time make

And here are the results:

Build Environment Time
AMD 5950X WSL2 Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 13m 29.210s
Intel i7-8700K Debian 12 Native 25m 43.889s
Azure 2 Core Ubuntu 20.04 LTS VM Over 3 hours
Carbon X1 i7-1260P WSL2 Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 67m 21.465s
Carbon X1 i5-6300 Fedora Core 39 98m 54.598s
Proxmox Ubuntu VM 32 Core and 128GB RAM 44m 18.523s

Build times

Extra cores and a more modern NVMe put the AMD in the lead. Azure is way behind with the smaller VM and lower IOPS. Anyway, it is comparison tool you might want to use.