What about power / TDP though? I personally lean heavily towards ARM/MIPS and hopefully soon RISC-V for that above all? Depends on the use case of course…
For tinkerers and experimentation TDP or power consumption is rarely a factor (for me anyway). I just need cheap access to compute that's available, right now. The device never runs long enough for power consumption to factor into total cost of ownership for me. Waiting forever for low consumption, and often more expensive devices, is for me personally, more expensive than whatever additional power a device I can use right now, when I need it, will draw. The cost of me losing inspiration/motivation due to waiting for a device, or not being able to afford a device, is an order of magnitude more costly than the few cents I'll spend from inefficient power draw. Focusing on TDP is a premature optimization imo, the same as when we hyper focus on loop efficiency in an app with zero users or scaling issues, you don't need to worry about it while in the validation phase, and probably not for a long time after that as well. And let's be honest here, unless you're optimizing every piece of software on the device (whether you wrote it or not), there is all kinds of needless power draw happening even on the lower TDP devices due to inefficiencies in the code.
For long term deployments, I think recycling what would become e-waste by reusing older enterprise units is better overall for the environment than letting it go to a dump and buying a lower power consumption unit.
TL;DR: TDP is not a factor for me, quick and lowish cost access to devices right away is way more important at the start
For long term deployments, I think recycling what would become e-waste by reusing older enterprise units is better overall for the environment than letting it go to a dump and buying a lower power consumption unit.
TL;DR: TDP is not a factor for me, quick and lowish cost access to devices right away is way more important at the start