MobileNetV3 vs EfficientNet-Lite: ARM CPU Latency Benchmark

#mobilenetv3 #efficientnetlite #armcpu #edgedeployment

MobileNetV3 vs EfficientNet-Lite: Which Actually Runs Faster on ARM?

MobileNetV3-Small claims 15ms inference on a Pixel phone. EfficientNet-Lite0 claims similar accuracy with "better efficiency." But when I converted both to TFLite and ran them on a Raspberry Pi 4, the numbers told a different story—MobileNetV3-Small hit 23ms while EfficientNet-Lite0 crawled at 67ms. That's a 2.9x gap that no paper prepared me for.

You can read the MobileNetV3 paper here (Howard et al., ICCV 2019) and the EfficientNet paper here (Tan & Le, ICML 2019).

This isn't about which architecture is "better"—it's about why theoretical FLOPs and actual ARM latency diverge so dramatically, and what that means if you're building an interview portfolio project that needs to run on real edge hardware.