[selfhoster11]

> The Pentium G6400 outperforms a Pi4 4-5x, and has a 54W TDP (onboard GPU so at least part of that is for the GPU, so CPU-only workloads will be less.) The Ryzen 5600x is 65W and is twice as fast (at least) as the G6400...

That's more energy efficient, sure. But it sets a lower boundary on the power draw much higher than a normal Pi. A Pi plus a single external HDD draws 12W at the socket, according to my measurements. A PC CPU draws 4-5x that, just by itself. The other components on the motherboard need power too, even if you use integrated graphics or no graphics at all.

A PC only becomes more power-efficient if your load can't fit in three or more Pis. For plenty of uses, more than two Pis are an overkill.

[LeonidasXIV]

That's exactly why you virtualize, so you don't just have a bunch of small Pis being mostly idle but less but more powerful machines running a lot of virtual istances that on their own are also mostly idle but you can put enough on to put enough load on the higher-powered machine to be worth it.

In a data center they should have enough instances that virtualizing makes sense from the perspective of power efficiency.

[selfhoster11]

Virtualisation means you can get noisy (or nosy: see Rowhammer) neighbors. VMs are fine, but there are valid reasons to prefer bare metal for hosting critical applications.

[KennyBlanken]

Nobody is hosting a "critical application" on a Raspberry Pi4 in some random-ass no-name colo.