Synopsis: ARM v6 CPUs are significantly slower than ARMv7 CPUs at the same clock speed, at least when running Debian (armhf) on them. I know it's a rather naive benchmark, but I tried running a tiny Perl program to find all the prime numbers under 100,000 on both the Raspberry Pi and the BeagleBone. They're both 700 MHz ARM CPUs, but the Raspberry runs on the older v6 spec CPU. Surprisingly, this seems to make a huge difference to performance. My desktop (3GHz i7) - 3.3 seconds BeagleBone (720 MHz ARMv7)- 68 seconds Raspberry Pi (700 MHz ARMv6) - 125 seconds I thought I'd try it quickly in Scala, but it seems the JVM isn't very well optimised on ARM yet :( So I tried it with just doing primes to 10,000 instead. Desktop - 0.33 s Beagle - 19 s (zero) / 34 s (jamvm) Raspberry - 58 s (jamvm) / 79 s (zero) It's curious to note that the best JVM varies between the architectures; Zero was a lot faster than JamVM on the Beagle, but it was a lot slower on Raspberry Pi. (for this naive benchmark) Does anyone know why that is, or if there's any way to get better jvm performance?