Teensy VS Arduino - Which one is faster? - educ8s.tv

I wanted to find out if Teensy 3.2, despite its small size, is faster than the Arduino Due, the fastest Arduino board available today. So I build a simple project where both boards run the same sketch, Newton’s approximation of Pi for 500.000 iterations. Which one is faster? The board that finished first. Teensy or Arduino Due?

A few weeks ago, I published a video about the impressive Teensy 3.2 board! The specs of the board look fantastic! It uses a 32bit ARM processor that can run at 96 MHz and has plenty of memory for our projects. From the specs, I thought that the performance of this tiny board would be similar with the performance of an Arduino Due which is the fastest Arduino board available today. But is that right? Let’s find out.

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1. Arduino Mega: https://educ8s.tv/part/ArduinoMega

2. Arduino Due: https://educ8s.tv/part/ArduinoDue

3. Teensy 3.2: http://bit.ly/Teensy_32

4. Color TFT display: https://educ8s.tv/part/7735

5. Push Button: https://educ8s.tv/part/Buttons

6. Small Breadboard: https://educ8s.tv/part/SmallBreadboard

7. Wires: https://educ8s.tv/part/Wires

Today’s experiment is this. An Arduino Mega, an Arduino Due and a Teensy 3.2 will run the same sketch. The Newton’s approximation of PI for half a million iterations. The time needed to execute this task is then displayed on a 1.8” Color TFT display. This way we are going to have a visual representation of the speed differences between the boards. In order to see how to connect the display with the Teensy or the Arduino boards check out the tutorial, I have prepared for that.

First I am going to compare the Teensy with the Arduino Mega. The Arduino Mega uses an 8bit processor which runs at 16 MHz. The Arduino Mega is having the same performance with the Arduino Uno, the Arduino Nano and the Arduino pro mini. From the specs alone we can tell that there is going to be a huge performance difference between the two boards. I have also connected a button to both boards so when I press it the computation of the Pi starts on both boards at the same time. Let’s start!

As you can see the Teensy board needed 3.5 seconds to perform this task! The Arduino Mega is struggling to calculate the Pi and drive the display. The Arduino Mega needed 34.7 seconds to complete the same task! That’s a huge difference, Teensy is almost 10 times faster than the Arduino Mega in this experiment!

Let’s now see the comparison of the Teensy board with the Arduino Due. Arduino Due also uses a 32bit ARM processor which runs at 84MHz. So from the specs, the computational power of it should be similar to that of the Teensy. Let’s try the same experiment.

The code of the project is based on the work of the user securd which posted his code on the Arduino forums. I slightly modified the code in order to use a button and to display the results on a color TFT display.

Teensy VS Arduino – Which one is faster?