03-01-2016, 11:50 PM
Heck, the Pi 2 runs rings around the original Pi.
64-bit doesn't really buy you anything in terms of performance unless you're working with 64-bit long long values (e.g., extended fixed precision, software rendering). Depending on the architecture and instruction set, switching from 32 to 64-bit code can make your program and/or runtime memory larger, due to things like memory alignment requirements.
The Cortex-a53 architecture does have performance improvements over earlier Cortex CPUs, so a lot of 32-bit code will run faster at the same clock rate.
64-bit doesn't really buy you anything in terms of performance unless you're working with 64-bit long long values (e.g., extended fixed precision, software rendering). Depending on the architecture and instruction set, switching from 32 to 64-bit code can make your program and/or runtime memory larger, due to things like memory alignment requirements.
The Cortex-a53 architecture does have performance improvements over earlier Cortex CPUs, so a lot of 32-bit code will run faster at the same clock rate.