Raspberry Pi is launching end of this month and actually I was looking for one of those devices. But before I buy it, I was curious how fast that SoC really is.
The Wiki shows this OpenSSL Speed result (link) (mirror)
I compared that to my Sheevaplug running Debian Lenny.
To my GuruPlug running Debian Lenny.
To my Dell Streak 7 running a Debian Lenny in a chroot environment.
And to my HTC Desire running Debian Lenny in a chroot env
I’d like to take out a random line to show them side by side:
Raspberry Pi:
dsa 2048 bits 0.073897s 0.087304s 13.5 11.5
Linux Zaurus SL-C1000
dsa 2048 bits 0.053441s 0.062785s 18.7 15.9
Pentium III, 500 MHz
dsa 2048 bits 0.024974s 0.030185s 40.0 33.1
600 MHz Celeron
dsa 2048 bits 0.020263s 0.024355s 49.4 41.1
Guruplug:
dsa 2048 bits 0.017623s 0.020725s 56.7 48.3
Sheevaplug:
dsa 2048 bits 0.017657s 0.020626s 56.6 48.5
HTC Desire:
dsa 2048 bits 0.017153s 0.020021s 58.3 49.9
Dell Streak 7:
dsa 2048 bits 0.015314s 0.017641s 65.3 56.7
Atom 330 1.6GHz:
dsa 2048 bits 0.005139s 0.006301s 194.6 158.7
Core2Duo 2 GHz (P7350?)
dsa 2048 bits 0.003546s 0.004271s 282.0 234.2
My Webserver:
dsa 2048 bits 0.002939s 0.003529s 340.2 283.4
Q6600 (Quad Core 2.4GHz):
dsa 2048 bits 0.001752s 0.002072s 570.8 482.6
Athlon X2 4000+ @ 2.8 Ghz:
dsa 2048 bits 0.000863s 0.001027s 1158.6 973.8
Amd X2 6000+:
dsa 2048 bits 0.000819s 0.000973s 1221.7 1028.0
Conclusion:
The Raspberry Pi is not worth the 35 USD + Shipping + Powerplug + Case + SDHC Card. You can get a Dell Streak for 199 USD (even cheaper on ebay if you dont mind a used device) with 5x the power, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, Screen, USV, around the same power usage (~2 Watt) and 16GB Flash. You can get USB host mode and HDMI on different Android models like Archos 70 IT (around 150 USD, USB host mode, HDMI out, 1 Ghz, 256mb RAM, 8GB internal Flash).
Edit: I added some more results from hajiso and ubuntuforums