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by arghwhat 980 days ago
To be fair, you also need to account for consumption when you make the machine do something. The TDPs for these machines are in the 25-35W range, and hitting 50W does not seem unreasonable. You of course won't be running that the entire time. The larger SFF machines with 65W TDPs will go way above that.

An orange pi 5 uses 7.5W under full load, 3.3W idle in comparison.
2 comments
0cf8612b2e1e 980 days ago
If the SFF is doing work, it might be done in a fraction of the time of the pi. Race to finish.

Hard to say without real workloads, but if there are any plans of routinely pegging the CPU, most power efficient strategy is to buy a modern chip.

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arghwhat 979 days ago
The orange pi 5 Geekbench score is ~75% of the i5-8500T used as example, so no - the sff won't be done in a fraction of the time. These CPUs are old and crusty after all...

I do agree that modern CPUs are required for high-load situations.

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briHass 979 days ago
If you agree, than relative measures of TDP/benchmark at the redline are pointless, ignoring that TDP number are often inaccurate anyway.

What you probably want to compare for most home uses is power at some low idle vs performance at that CPU throttle level. The difference is probably a Watt or two max, which never would justify a brand new SBC over repurposing something headed to ewaste for environmental reasons.

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ilyt 980 days ago
Is orange pi 5 as fast as 35W TDP intel CPU ? How many times slower it is than the 65W one ?

Average consumption matters, not peak. And you can pin CPU to not go on higher frequencies if you don't want to go into inefficient max frequency/max voltage region.

You will also be recycling already produced device.

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arghwhat 979 days ago
According to Geekbench, an i5-8500T scores ~1100 single core, ~4000 multicore with it's 35W TDP, while the Orange Pi 5 gets ~840 single core and ~2900 multicore. About 75% of the performance at less than 20% of the power. Not too shabby, despite the orange pi being no efficiency star.

Recycling is good, but only to a point. At some point the cost of operation (and resource pressure from its use) will exceed the cost of a more efficient device - at least until we get abundant green power...

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