[everforward]

You seem knowledgeable so you may already know, but it's worth looking at the x86 mini PCs. Performance per watt has gotten pretty close on the newer low power CPUs (e.g. N150, unsure what AMD's line for that is), and performance per $ spent on hardware is way higher. I'm seeing 8GB Pi 5s with a power supply and no SD card for $100; you can get an N150 mini PC with 16GB of RAM and 500GB SSD pre-installed for like $160. Double the RAM, double the CPU performance, and comes with an SSD.

Imo, Raspberry Pis haven't been cost competitive general compute devices for a while now unless you want GPIO pins.

[dangus]

The first thing I thought when I read this article was how raspberry pi’s just make this kind of thing more difficult and annoying compared to a regular normal PC, new (e.g. cheap mini PC) or used (e.g. used business workstation or just a plain desktop PC).

And if you want GPIO pins I’d imagine that a lot of those applications you’d be better served with an ESP32 and that a raspberry pi is essentially overkill for many of those use cases.

The Venn diagram for where the pi makes sense seems smaller than ever these days.

[bigiain]

> And if you want GPIO pins I’d imagine that a lot of those applications you’d be better served with an ESP32

I often us an Arduino plugged onto a spare USB port. There's a whole lot of GPIO pin related projects that suit 5V better than 3.3V, and Arduino IO pins are practically unbreakable compared to ESP32. I've got Arduinos that still work fine after accidentally connecting 12V directly to IO pins. I've has ESP32s (and RasPis) give up the ghost just from looking at the IO pins while thinking about 12V.

[perdomon]

You're right that the Venn diagram is smaller than it was 5 years ago, but there are still some folks whose primary concern is electricity usage. Even the pi 5 shines there (as long as you don't need too much compute).

[dangus]

I would argue that something like an Intel N100 mini PC isn’t doing noticeably worse on your power bill, and more powerful x86 mini PCs will give you a better performance per dollar at close enough performance per watt.

And then you get all the advantages of the x86 ecosystem, more modularity, etc.

Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if the base model M series Mac mini is competitive so long as you can get Asahi Linux to do what you need.

Maybe five years from now we will see ARM or RISC-V mini PCs further narrow the Venn diagram for raspberry pi systems.

[dangus]

(By more modularity I meant stuff like storage and RAM, obviously RPi has a much higher degree of a different kind of modularity)

[9029]

Used Intel 8th gen based mini PCs seem like a pretty good value. 100-150 bucks for a pc from a somewhat reputable brand (lenovo, dell, hp) with slightly better multi core than N150 and ~6W idle if you manage to get it to stay in C10. Some of them have a low profile pcie slot, like M720q and M920q. Also the CPU is socketed so you could technically upgrade it to e.g. i9-9900K, at least the M920q is known to take one as long as you use a powerful enough PSU. Few of them (at least M920q) also support coreboot due to an Intel Boot Guard vuln which could be fun, I'm planning to look into whether it could be ported to my M720q as well.

[9029]

Update on power draw for anyone interested: measured with a cheap AC power meter, I get 2.8-4.2W idle with occasional jump to up to 8W on my M720q with i5-8400T, 16GB ram and a single nvme drive. This is on Debian 13 with ASPM enabled for everything and a few containers running (home assistant, esphome, bookstack, tailscale). According to powertop stats on C-states, it's mostly in package C9 and core C10.

[Havoc]

Yeah have a collection of minipc - they are indeed great. This build was more NAS focused. 9x SATA SSD and 6x NVME...minipcs just don't have the connectivity for that sort of thing

>Imo, Raspberry Pis haven't been cost competitive general compute devices for a while now unless you want GPIO pins.

I have a bunch of rasp 4Bs that I'll use for a k8s HA control plane but yeah outside of that they're not idea. Especially with the fragility of SD card instead of nvme (unless you buy the silly HAT thing).

[heresie-dabord]

> Raspberry Pi 5s can actually support NVME drives

And Raspberry Pi 4s can actually boot from NVME via a USB enclosure.