What is the point for a consumer to use a Raspberry PI 4 today?
I recently purchased a mini PC with an Intel N5105, 16GB of Ram, 512GB NVME SSD, two gigabit ethernet ports, two HDMI ports, many USB ports, and Wifi 6. This system was $180, all in. You can't find a Pi 4, much less one with equivalent specs for anywhere near this price. If you can find it, an 8GB PI4 is $75 and then you need to buy the case, power supply, sometimes storage, etc.
The N5105 system when under full load is only drawing 7 watts, I've seen it as low as 4 watts when idle. The Pi 4 uses a BCM2711, which according to Passmark, is about 4X slower than an Intel N5105.
I do think the PI is great from the hobbyist and industrial perspective, but to just use it as an inexpensive PC seems like a waste.
> I recently purchased a mini PC with an Intel N5105, 16GB of Ram, 512GB NVME SSD, two gigabit ethernet ports, two HDMI ports, many USB ports, and Wifi 6. This system was $180, all in
That's an unusually low price, assuming it's new. Can you give a reference of the shop where you purchased it?
For example, the first price I've found of a Gigabyte Brix (a relatively common mini PC) with an N2807 + 8 GB RAM + 512 GB SSD + no wifi, is 210+ USD.
One of the cheapest x86 systems that I'm aware of, is the Odroid H3 (+), which still costs 129$ without RAM/disk/Wifi.
This is definitely a machine I'd suggest as ARM SBC competitor, but I'm not sure that the price is representative of mini x86 systems (when I was looking for one, a few years ago, it was the cheapest by a significant amount).
I'd love to know where you got that PC for that price.
I just spent 20 minutes doing some searches in all the usual suspects (Amazon, eBay, AliXpress, and some online stores I can usually get good prices from) and the cheapest I found for the configuration you specified was around $400..
Mostly it seems to be the RAM that boosts the cost. For 8GB I can get it down to $260, but I've seen nothing even close to $180.
Edit: I see elsewhere in the thread it's a Beelink from Amazon. Around ~$237 is still the cheapest I can find..
The prices went up recently, but another similar one is the Morefine M8S (on aliexpress). N5105, 16G ram, 512GB SSD, 3x HDMI, 3x USB 3.0, 2x gigabit ethernet, Wi-Fi6, BT5.2, USB-C charging, ~$253.
N5105 Jasper Lake systems do this pretty well. Has a good iGPU, particularly for a low end budget intel chip. Efficient. Has Quick Sync for video.
The laptops use the N6000 chip, N5105 is for the small desktop lines. There is also a more expensive N6005 for desktop.
N6000 is more aggressive in power savings. So higher single thread, lower multi. It also has more silicon dedicated to the GPU, which is about a 25% boost (30 execution units vs 24).
The biggest practical difference I've seen is that 95% of the laptops have fixed memory that tops out at 8GB. HP has one that accepts an SO-DIMM. If this is a reasonable level for the minecraft they do then you should be fine. I know with my kid's systems I had to go up to 12GB because of the mods they like.
Yep, tried for months to find a Pi4 to replace an old Pi2 for home experimentation. I've only tried a few things needing the GPIO pins, mostly it's just an always-on computer I can proxy through and self host on. But the Pi2 was getting into swap all the time and needed an upgrade.
Found a Thinkcentre M600 on ShopGoodwill for $40 with an SSD. Added $10 of RAM and it's honestly a better fit for what I do with it. Crazy slow for a windows desktop but perfectly snappy running debian.
For someone just looking for an inexpensive PC, and with the way availability and markup are right now, the Pi just doesn't make sense. Used / cheap SFFs are a good way to go.
If you want to connect a "regular PC" to the real world, you can get a USB DAQ but even the cheapo LabJack, NI or MCC models are at least a hundred bucks.
The GPIO on the PI is compromised for any hard realtime usage by the fact its running linux (ignoring what can be done with a lot of extra work with a RT kernel and pinning cores).
For non realtime use, the $10 USB->GPIO ones work fine on any computer with USB.
In fact many of them are just ESP's, and work even better than the pi for hard real-time because you write custom bitbanging ardunio code and send the results/control signal over the USB. They become custom peripherals with a /dev/ttyUSB endpoint.
with circuit python (basically Micropython) from adafruit you can open a screen session to the USB port and get a REPL interface. I wonder if you could set something up to script input and output from REPL (i'm not a python expert). If you could then you'd have a little pipe to the micro-controller where you could enter python and have it execute and return a value. From there you have all the GPIO and other features available on the microcontroller available to you on your computer.
I have one of adadruit's RP2040 boards and use the REPL a lot to talk to other things connected to the i2c bus. For example, controlling servos from a servo board, or getting orientation data from an IMU. Basically, i treat the circuit python REPL like a command line
Sure, in many cases. Depending on the situation, though, it may be no more hassle than any other USB GPIO device, so it's a decent enough cheap solution if you can't or don't want to use a Pi or a similar SBC.
> What is the point for a consumer to use a Raspberry PI 4 today?
does one stop being a consumer once the GPIO is touched?
Intel boards with a unified GPIO are pricey industrial units, and I don't consider pinning out a serial port or parallel port to be a very clean solution; and I consider an attached sister-board Arduino to be even less tidy.
Having a desktop with that type of IO is just handy for the things that I do as hobbies, just as my multimedia Intel-based laptop is handy for when I want to consume media.
the unit price is ridiculous for RPis right now though, i'll certainly agree to that.
What brand is your system from? Or isn't it pre-assembled? The price of $180 sounds perfect for an increase in performance and still low power requirements.
I just saw their website. Definitely an option for when my RPi lets me down, or - more likely - when I need to do heavier stuff. But these Beelink things come with fans... how's the noise?
It's essentially silent, I've only ever heard the fan when I'm within a foot of the unit. I pulled the unit apart and the fan looked pretty standard.
There are also models on Amazon that use the N5105 that are passively cooled. I havn't used one, so I'm not sure if there is any throttling going on with those models.
Pi 400 is about $70, or with power supply and mouse and a few other goodies it is $100. It is essentially a 4gb pi 4 built into a keyboard. The power supply is a basic 15 watt usb-c cube, so you probably have one around already. 400's are fairly easy to buy, unlike 4's. It would be nice if they made an 8gb one. I wonder if DIY upgrade is possible.
Thanks for the heads up. It still has the gpio pins and USB and wifi, I'll just need to find a (bigger) box that fits it. Chips out of a washing machine scenario here
1) The pi 400 is not exactly abundant and it won't be easy to buy large quantities. When I said they were easy to get, I meant you could e.g. put yourself on adafruit's waiting list and get a notification fairly quickly that allows you to snag a unit, or maybe 2 units, but either way it is a low limit. Even if you are obnoxious and go buy up all you can find night and day, it still won't be a lot on the scale of things.
2) the packaging with the keyboard actually is fairly compact. I'm going to use mine like I would normally used a boxed 4b (i.e. as sort of a home server tucked out of sight) but am not going to try taking the board out of the case. It looks like a small keyboard in a normal keyboard enclosure and doesn't take that much space. It isn't really that visible that there is a computer inside.
Its not a Intel platform (trust issues due to IME)
See, this is what I don't understand, the pi's GPU is running a huge pile of closed source proprietary code as well, and at a first approximation has full system visibility too (ignoring it apparently has a bug limiting its actual view of all system ram on the higher capacity models). It could in theory be injecting/monitoring the nic as well. AKA, its just as privileged as the ME.
So why do you "trust" it more than the intel? If anything the intel probably has 100x as many security researchers analyzing it.
Also RE power, the pi idle power tends to be quite poor. Mine idles at ~4W, which is worse than a number of low end intel machines I have, so for something that might sit idle for >12H a day, it might be less efficient than recent intel machines.
>ignoring it apparently has a bug limiting its actual view of all system ram on the higher capacity models
AFAIK that SoC had big and little DMA engines. The little engines can't reach the upper half of memory but the bigger ones can, which means you can just use the big DMA engines to muck with any RAM you yourself can't directly see. It's annoying for practical purposes but it doesn't have any security value.
When the machine owner asks for it, has there been a case where its been caught sending packets otherwise?
I mean its a "feature" being sold, if you get a vpro/amt machine it still needs to be turned on (the couple I have, have bios options for enabling/disabling the management features).
There was no proof of the whole NSA Prism thing either, but we still "knew" it would be there and acted as if it was there. Until Snowden leaked the stuff and we learned its name.
I'm not going to wait until the next Snowden uncovers whatever the IME is for.
Also, the plan was $100 for the pi4+keyboard+everything combo before all this (lets just call it the 2020 era) happened. But $100 is still a much better deal than $180.
These jasper lake/etc machines are usually between $100 and $200 new and are a much better deal than an 8G rpi, even at MSRP for a laundry list of reasons starting with they are much more capable machines.
Look for chuwi herobox, beelink, etc
The pi's were priced right when they were $35, because adding storage, case, RTC hat, powersupply, etc would double or triple the machine build cost but still land <$100 when the floor on cheap PC's (usually Via) were in the $300 range. But driving the price up for just a tiny amount of ram...?
These days you can buy new windows tablets for $200 (from big companies like HP for example), and these low end NUC style boxes frequently for less than $100. Sure the perf isn't great, but even the worst are equal or better than the very aged A72, low clocked designs lacking even crypto acceleration you find in the rpi4.
Never mind if your actually trying to just save money, midrange refurb and used machines from a couple years back will give you perf within a few percent of the current hardware in the same price range, and its going to be far more capable.
(I just stumbled on a very capable i5 based HP slim fanless desktop, refurb for $109 on amazon while checking the prices of that chuwi. There are a bunch of these "laptop in a slim desktop" case systems frequently for very reasonable prices.)
For something you use as a main computer, it's hard to see how the time lost on something 3X slower can ever justify the ~$100 saved. At least for anyone who spends a decent amount of time on a computer and is in the developed world with a job.
There is a floor where browsing the web is _painful_, and the pi is definitely in that category on any site that isn't hackernews levels of javascript. I challenge you to give amazon or ebay a try on it, or just spend a bit of time on youtube. Things you take for granted, like being able to run videos full screen won't happen on the pi if your monitor is HD or better.
We have an absolutely terrible bloat problem on the web. Unfortunately, using a slow PC on our end won't solve it. If we could force web devs to work on raspberry pis or old atom netbooks, the world would be a better place.
That's what I did, basically. I forced myself to work on low end machines because there might be a chance my website system also runs in a browser on a low end machine. My website with this blogpost is holding up perfectly fine by the way, even with all HN visitors, peaking at almost 2 visits each second for some hours. Also credits to my webhost!
It is funny to think of the hoops I jumped through to get things working nicely on an old Atom processor. My Makefiles were so good, everything was tracked compilation only happened when necessary...
Yeah, this is basically what I mean. Personally, I think the performance of SBC boards with Celeron N5105 is my baseline for "acceptable" performance for a desktop. Anything slower I will deliberately avoid due to the jank and inconvenience factor.
Tangential, but I learned the other day that if you have access to a 3D printer, there are a lot of free designs for RPi cases on the STL-sharing sites.
Some of them add extra value by doubling as other desktop furniture (phone stands, pen holders, etc.).
This was exactly my case. I spent around that price point, before 'the 2020 era'. The RPi4 definitely needs cooling. Luckily for me the passive cooling case/ribs works, so I don't need fans.
Yes. At least, they did at the other recent popups.
>
Raspberry Pi 4 (2GB, 4GB, and 8GB) will be in stock at the pop-up. Please be aware that we’re limiting Raspberry Pi 4 to one of these computers per person. Note that the limit is one of any, not one of each, so you won’t be able to purchase one 2GB model and one 8GB model — you can only buy one of any of these computers. We’ve decided to do this to try to ensure that everyone who has made the trip to Oxford Street can pick up one of these harder-to-come-by boards.
While a Pi can be used to browse the internet a bit and write some text, i would not want to endure the low performance for anything even slightly more heavy weight.
I absolutely hate to wait for slow compile times, long startup times, slow disk writes and laggy browsers. All of which you will get on a Pi.
The sad truth is that for no reason a lot of modern software is super bloated and eats resources like crazy. And you can not avoid those in work related environments.
Things like elastic search, a bunch of docker containers, an IDE, multiple browsers, Thunderbird, Slack and so on... must run in parallel without any hiccup.
And my case it has to drive at least 2 monitors, without any complaints, all while video conferencing is running.
My base memory usage is around at 10-15 gb all the time (i am using ubuntu with awesome wm) good luck cramming that in the 8gb of the Pi and a swap on a SD card (hope you got an SSD).
Modern computers are super silent anyway so who cares if the Pi is quieter than the AC or the cars outside the window.
As it stands Pi are ridiculously expensive nowadays so there is really no reason to put up with a subpar solution.
Just get a cheap (used) workstation or mini PC which costs the same and is multiple times as powerful. If it is too loud replace the fans with silent ones those are cheap too...
My Pi3 is now driving my 3d Printer which is a more appropriate use case.
And my Pi4 collects dust behind the TV because it is a bit too slow to serve as a media computer at 4k.
I bought those years ago (60€ or so) and would feel completely ripped of if i had paid the current prices.
>I absolutely hate to wait for slow compile times, long startup times, slow disk writes and laggy browsers. All of which you will get on a Pi.
Undeniably correct - but if you use your Pi or any other SBC as a poor man's VDI terminal, in other words, using it to remote into a better computer elsewhere, then it's kind of OK. Personally I still found it too slow and laggy for my taste and instead used an Intel NUC. There's probably a good meet-in-the-middle device available on Aliexpress like the fanless systems people use for firewalls but they too can be pricey (vs a Pi). Would love to see a small ARM device powerful enough to push 4k video but still otherwise fanless, preferably something that could be bolted to the VESA block on a monitor or at least hidden behind the monitor.
Not the parent, but seeing this CTA, I might - I have one that’s been sitting unused for a long while, even bought the nice case and all. Thought I’d use it but nah.
I cannot buy a Pi 4 (8GB) locally at all. Amazon appears to offer one for 200-250 euros. For 200 euros or less, I can get a NUC-style mini PC at my local electronics store that is more powerful. I wouldn't mind trying out a Pi-as-a-PC, but new models either just aren't available or aren't reasonably priced.
I use an old NUC with a i5-4250U CPU on an Akasa fanless case and it's pretty great.
One of the tricks is to run a very thin and simple stack to get really low latency. No compositor, no DE, just a WM and X. And Ethernet.
It copes with Google Meet or MS Teams just fine, as well as any light development. I do all heavy lifting by SSHing to a huge workstation.
There are lots of nice options if one wants to purchase a brand new fanless desktop: Cirrus7, Tranquil, CompuLab, etc. And of course, fancy DIY with e.g. a Streacom case.
In my case I use a NUC but with Gnome with Wayland , NixOS and a Xanmod kernel (multimedia/rt/input optimized throughput) with some blobs purged. No desktop effects.
On the netbook, OpenBSD with cwm+xterm+gnufont+tmux plus mpv,gv,mupdf,nsxiv and sometimes links -g and a forked dillo.
On SSH, I don't care even if I use wireless: I use Mosh and the remote server it's handled either by Tmux or Screen.
I bought a couple of Odroid HC4. I boot from a microSD. I can plug my old SATA disks in there. The board with an old 750 HDD consumes 12 to 15 W. If I unmount the HDD file system and switch off the disk with udisksctl power-off it's only 4 W. Any operation on the device turns the disk on again. I'll check with a spare SSD.
Even if I had a different use case Pis are impossible to find at a price worth paying for. I'm starting to forget about them.
A quick google search shows raspberry pi 4 8gb ram selling at 140 eur in italy, 100 eur in hungary. If you live in the eu why do you limit your searches to one country? It feels like those people complaining they cant find ps5s or gpus yet i comfortably sourced mine from various countries, new, at a decent price, even during the pandemic. If you own a small ltd you can even buy them vat free.
Is it actually in stock at this price? Where I am, local price tracker, tweakers.net, also shows some listings for ~100 euro, but if you click through to the seller's website, it says there "not in stock, delivery date unknown". If you limit to what you can actually buy, it's ~200 euros, and even that - often with a week or two of lead-time.
I’ve noticed listings like that more and more lately. A dark pattern where you initially think something is in stock but is actually sold by a third party of a third party.
Galagomarket seems to have the RPi 4B 8GB in stock for 99€. Don't know where they ship, but the website is translated into Croation, English, German, Italian, Serbian, Hungarian, Slovenian and Slovakian. I bought from them in Feb 2021 and got mine delivered quickly.
Thanks for the link - i love this kind of small shops selling hobby electronics. I dont see an indication that they dont ship in all of the eu, at least according to their tocs. Seems like sending to outside slovenia costs 5 eur, peanuts. What i do usually is i just email them beforehand to be sure - a good test of their responsiveness as well.
This! Its why I love using geizhals, you can select to show all sellers from not just your own country but all of EU,UK as well. And immediately filter for availability and shipping.
Yeah I bought a used Lenovo M720q NUC style 6 core i5-8400T 16Gb Ram 512Gb NVMe machine for less than a new Pi 4 8Gb. With a windows 10 pro license. Makes one hell of a home server.
This is nice but I can't even buy one! I've been "casually" shopping for a Raspberry Pi for a while now and it seems almost impossible without assistance from a bot, or immense effort.
Right, and while the RPi ecosystem is fantastic, there are better processors for the price. I've been patiently waiting for the RK3588. I think it's the first ARM chip that will make a suitable desktop replacement for me, with dual monitors. The Orange Pi 5 will be a good value, if it ever drops. The Rock 5 Model B is available now, but the price is too high. I recently bought an Inovato Quadra. It's a TV box with Linux preinstalled for $30, comes with a nice case too. I've also been buying old chromeboxes on eBay and flashing them with mr.chromebox's EUFI firmware to make them into regular computers. It's just amazing what you can get for $30 these days.
Would you consider a Pi 400, the model with the C64-like keyboard? They still seem to be available, and seem ideal for the daily computer use-case. Though I guess the difference between 4GB & 8GB RAM is significant.
True. I was lucky enough to already have one. I recently tried to find another one here in The Netherlands. Usually they're out of stock but can be backordered.
I use a Raspberry Pi 4/8G as my maine (ha ha) development machine. I have a special case, which is that I mostly ssh into my websites hosted by digital ocean. I usually have several terminal sessions (+3), some local terminal sessions and firefox. I use the pi mainly because I can have two monitors at once.
I just installed ubuntu 22.10 desktop and it appears to work well. I use ubuntu mainely because it is what I run on my remote systems and as long as "it just works" locally then I don't have to deal with many differences between the systems.
The best thing I did was to have it boot from a cheap kingston 120GB ssd ($18 now). Makes a world of difference in speed.
My biggest complaint is that firefox is a little slow on the uptake, I am usually debugging some web interaction with developer tools and once the page is up it is as fast as I need.
I don't play games, I don't edit videos (haven't tried) or other things.
>I have a special case, which is that I mostly ssh into my websites hosted by digital ocean.
This sounds like what I do, except I mosh from a MacBook into a VM on my own server, which in turn runs tmux with mosh sessions to other machines, physical (including the same MacBook) and virtual. They are all local, but there is nothing preventing the sessions from being hosted somewhere else.
>I usually have several terminal sessions (+3), some local terminal sessions and firefox
Do you run Firefox remotely? I run Chrome and Firefox on the MacBook I use to mosh into the first aforementioned machine above. I read mail on one of the terminal sessions with VM on emacs; it passes via SSH URLs from messages to the local browser. Overall, I am very, very satisfied with my setup.
Yeah, SSD is a must for any serious work on a Pi, although I still can’t imagine running something like IntelliJ IDEA directly on it.
With the recent release of browser-access VS Code, I feel like we’re only a few years away from cloud development as dominant paradigm. We’ll grouse about it here (“what happens when my network connection fails?”) but I suspect using a “terminal” to develop on a remote machine is likely to be the only option for future generations of developers.
Coding in an ephemeral development environment is actually kinda nice. Whether that is a fully remote system or inside a Docker container. It’s nice to have a fully specified development environment that can be recreated at any time. I’ve started doing this for some newer projects and it’s refreshing. You don’t need to install compilers or libraries on your live system — it’s all stored in the container.
This is what I see as the winning paradigm. Whether that environment is remote or local is almost an implementation detail, and should be unimportant to the developer at the keyboard.
But the remote development aspect is even more important if you do notebook-style data analysis (which is increasingly more like traditional programming). In this case, browser/HTML based notebooks have been a game changer in that you can have long running sessions on heavy duty servers, controlled from smaller local machines. And the local machine only has to have a web browser.
Incidentally, my first foray into this development model was when I was trying to use my iPad as a dev machine. I hooked up an RPi to the iPad over USB-C and connected to the RPi running code-server (before vscode had their own remote server option). It worked surprisingly well, but the biggest hinderance was storage. And if you’re already connecting over a web browser, no need to limit yourself to a locally attached RPi…
> The best thing I did was to have it boot from a cheap kingston 120GB ssd ($18 now). Makes a world of difference in speed.
Nice. I also want to try this, just to get the most speed and performance out of it, without giving in reliability or durability. I should also check out Jeff Geerling's comparison of different MicroSD cards for the RPi.
I started out using a cheap MicroSD and it only lasted a week or two before failing; I've since replaced it with a 128 GB SATA SSD with a USB3-SATA dongle I bought off Amazon. No SD card needed and it's served me incredibly well. I figured that even the best MicroSD card isn't going to be designed to run as a computer's boot drive, and SATA SSDs are cheap and plentiful.
This is interesting. I wonder if one could use PINN or NOOBS on a portable USB SSD drive as well in order to multiboot the needful on one bigly ssd..(?)
Running on reduced power is not even close to hard, what with the powerful monstrosities our modern systems are. The only really tricky bit is to not try to push too much stuff through the graphics pipelines (higher res graphics is effectively O(n^2) as resolution increases), or use code that gets too clever spending lots of CPU for marginal stuff like pretty animations or something. An RPi4 is comfortably more powerful than anything I had prior to 2010, and if you've got decent solid state storage on it you could argue even past that.
It really ought to be snappy and very effective, for everything except maybe the web browser, and that's more the fault of bloated web sites than the computer or the browser in my opinion. This ought to be nothing special, just what people expect.
True. And that's why I realized again today why I'm so positively surprised by the fact that the RPi actually _can_ do all of the (basic) stuff I want from my desktop computer.
If it works for you than that’s all what matters.
If you want a quiet computer without the HW configuration constrains of single board with no slots, I recommend older HP EliteDesk G2 (or newer) 35W SFF. You can get them for about the same price as RPi 4/8GB and they have the option of M.2 SSD and ram expansion. The fan is down to minimal RPM (imo not even audible) and it stays cool. I have been using these for my home servers for years. Just like you, I cannot stand the noise of fans and these are sitting directly behind me and are completely quiet.
Even with the slowest cpu options (i3), the performance is in multiples of Pi)
Confirmed I bought 2 HP EliteDesk G2 within the last two years and they really are great for a non-gaming workstation or server. Both under $135. One was an I5-4590 and the other an I7-4770T (both 4th gen and generally capable CPUs), both with 16G ram and an SSD. One had no OS, however the onboard license allowed me to install Win 10 Pro without any issue. Obviously these are also great for throwing Linux onto.
Ironically, the Microsoft ARM Developer Kit that was just released might be a good option. [1] I also personally have used a Qualcomm RB5 [2][3] since last year and can say that it is quite snappy, though the official image is ancient and the modern Debian Linux image Linaro works on for it was still rather buggy. The most robust option is likely Nvidia's AGX Orin Developer Kit [4][5], which Nvidia maintains 20.04 Ubuntu images for [6].
With 4 big Cortex-X1 cores and 4 medium Cortex-A78 cores, the new MS Developer Kit should be much faster than the Qualcomm RB5, which has 4 Cortex-A77 cores.
Also the price, at $600, is decent in comparison with the excessive prices requested by NVIDIA for the faster of the Orin variants.
Unfortunately, the new MS Developer Kit also includes a Microsoft Pluton, and it is very likely that Pluton is configured to allow only Windows to boot.
Otherwise, I would have also been tempted by it, because all the previous ARM-based alternatives have been either very slow, like Raspberry Pi, or very expensive in comparison with the computers with Intel or AMD CPUs having similar performance, like the Qualcomm and NVIDIA development kits.
The Lenovo X13s is basically a laptop version of the new dev kit, and it seems people are running Linux on it successfully [1][2], so hopefully they haven't done anything different with the dev kit.
Linux on it is very broken in any number of situations, its basically at the level of the M1, which is at the moment probably a better choice if you want a 1/2 working machine.
Things you take for granted as working, and performing well, won't. Putting it another way, its at an early stage of bring up, on x86 you buy a laptop it will tend to mostly work in linux with a problem here/there that will likely get resolved over the next year or two. This is the same, only the level of busted is much worse, enough you probably won't want to actually use it as a daily driver.
It's a fine windows machine, and virtualizes linux just fine, but the same can be said of the M1 as well.
Raspberry Pi isn’t the fastest ARM SBC. If you want something significantly faster, order the new ROCK5 SBC with 16GB of RAM. Being new, it won’t have the same level of polish and support (which can be extremely important depending on your application) but these are so much faster than the Pi that it can be worth it depending on your use case.
Nothing in the SBC world is going to come close to an M1 any time soon, though. The fastest ARM SoCs just don’t end up in SBCs.
Looked into it and seems worth a try somewhere in the future. The active community of Raspberry Pi users everywhere online helped me tremendously while setting up and troubleshooting my RPi, that was definitely a consideration to stick with RPi.
When is it due to actually be available? Announced 10 months ago and seems only started sampling last month. Any evidence they aren't also going to get shafted by the shortages?
And as always, this is the biggest problem with Rock stuff.
> ROCK5 maker Radxa says the board supports Linux kernel 5.10 and will be able to run operating systems including Android 12 and Debian 10 Buster.
Why ARM specifically? Many Linux packages are not ported to ARM. Furthermore, non-Apple ARM CPUs are much slower.
There are lots of fanless x86_64 options that are also energy efficient if you are willing to buy from small manufacturers or stick a fanless case yourself.
The M1 performs so well partly because it uses a very advanced fabrication process.
A modern Ryzen is going to have comparable single-core performance, better multi-core performance and slightly higher energy usage.
Yeah, compatibility for x86 is much better. If you want a cheap fanless sbc-style setup then the best options today are likely Celeron N5105 or Pentium N6005 based systems (e.g. MeLE Quieter3 or Odroid-H3+). They are around $300 and far more performant and much better connectivity (i.e. they have 8x PCIe-3 lanes) vs similarly priced ARM systems.
The closest ARM systems in price and performance are the new RK3588 based ones like the Khadas Edge 2 or ROCK 5B, but those really are only practical if you really need the NPU and MIPI camera inputs they provide. They carry only a minor power efficiency edge (max draw around 12W vs maybe 18W for the x86 boards), are compromised in software compatibility, and are limited in IO (i.e. either PCIe-2 only or PCIe-3 but with only 4 lanes).
Those x86 chips are an older generation as well. I'd keep an eye out for i3-1215u based boards soon if you want something that can still be fanless and tiny but has more oomph.
Probably underpowered for your needs, but within a year or two I am expecting used Chromebooks to be up-to-date enough to include the current Linux (e.g. Debian) support. So perhaps $50 and will include keyboard, screen, and ca 5W idle consumption.
> I use a Raspberry Pi 4 (with 8GB of RAM) as my daily desktop computer. I browse the internet, read and send e-mails, program software, edit photos, create images, watch Youtube videos and play games on it. Without any significant problems.
Yes for those lite tasks is fine, and you can also save some watts. The things are different when you want to do audio/video/photo production.
This is wild, huge majority of people I know personally who use computers want to do at least one of these things once in a while. Or if not this, some CAD work, 3d modeling, and other computationally expensive things
I agree with you, but all those tasks alternate with many hours during which a personal computer is used only for reading and editing documents, or Internet browsing, or audio listening or video watching.
For the latter activities, a computer bigger than an Intel NUC or similar computers is never needed.
I do CAD work, compilation of large software projects and other tasks that need a fast computer, but I do these on a couple of big tower servers, which I wake up only when necessary.
As a PC, I use an Intel NUC, but now there are more alternatives to it than ever, e.g. there are several models of small computers with AMD Rembrandt Ryzen 6000 CPUs.
The NUC-like computers are faster than the cheap laptops having the same CPUs and they also have a much more complete set of peripheral ports.
I frequently see comments that there are laptops which are cheaper than the NUC-like computers, but those cheap laptops are typically garbage that I would not use even if I would receive them for free. A laptop comparable in performance, versatility and reliability with a $1000 NUC-like computer may cost $3000 or more.
I'm gonna second gp, I don't know anyone who does photo/video editing, cad/cam or 3D modeling.
In fact, I know more people with > 3 pi's than I do coders. People love them and use them for all sorts. But I don't know anyone who does any of those things.
Yeah. "Production", implying a high standard of professional quality using a base of uncompressed 4K or 8K might be a bad idea, sure, or trying to run a live event with half-a-dozen input streams and live streaming back out to the internet.
But plenty of uses of video editing would still be perfectly possible on an RPi4. It might be noticeably faster on a "real" desktop, but it would be perfectly doable, especially if you were working in less than 1080P for some reason, like a DVD source video.
Maybe I do know and it has to do with software bloat? I don't find it hard to believe that the software you ran on your Pentium was less bloated somehow.
4k and 8k video. With 720p OFC a G4 macbook or some bumped up dual Pentium III with Cinelerra/Cinepaint under Linux and a Geforce 3 was more than enough.
Apparently the two motivators here were noise and price (pre-owned hardware).
What would be best if the primary motivator was reducing electricity for a solar-powered setup? I assume e-ink would be the best screen, though it costs a pretty penny for a respectable screen size. It might be worth using a laptop to have the battery taken care of.
Good question. If having a daily desktop environment is still your use case, than maybe a 7 inch (touch) screen from Waveshare is an option? I have one that has a good color screen and says it's also low power consumption, but I never compared to low power alternatives like an e-ink screen.
I would definitely try an e-ink in person if you haven’t yet. They have gotten much better but even the top of the line models have woeful refresh rates.
Ive used a RPi4 4GB as my only computer for well over a year, without any issues. I use my VPS via SSH for any heavy coding tasks. Libre Office, Claws email suit my everyday needs. I’d also like to my get my hands on the 8GB Pi4 version. In theses times of expensive electricity bills, I can have the pi running all day.
I did that for a while when my previous laptop broke. It was fine with a lightweight linux desktop but it was quite slow using an ultrawide screen and horribly slow for some compilations, but it felt like an "almost there" concept, just arrive to the office and turn on the screen.
With a normal resolution and in a cloud IDE environment or interpreted only languages like python could have perfectly worked, also for everyone who doesn't need exotic binaries.
Some thoughts I had were also, that I could have set up a server-web IDE on it and work on the way with a tablet and a keyboard without rely on a third party cloud, but again, I needed to compile binaries.
hey HNers, this is sorta related to an idea I have, using a Pi plus an RF transceiver for reading RFID tags. Commercial ones with Bluetooth seem to run $1,000 or more.
I'm helping out with a food distribution org (lfrad.org). One of their gleaners, Steve, would like an easy way to estimate the weight of the food they've collected from a supermarket. The idea we like is to attach an RFID tag to each box of food (not each item), and segregate the types of food, e.g. a bread box, a produce box, a milk box. Steve already does the repacking, in boxes in his SUV. He knows the average weight of a box of each type of food.
The tags will just say what kind of food it is. They can be reused once they're counted.
Note that the boxes don't come pre-packed from the store, and he doesn't lay them all out on the ground before putting them in his car.
SO: the goal is, he just points his homebrew RFID reader at the car full of boxes, and it counts the boxes of each type of food.
Has anyone ever done anything like this?
He's a former circuit designer, so hardware hacking is not beyond him. I also have other friends who could help. I think a funky-looking homebrew product is actually preferable to a commercial one, since who's going to steal it?
EDIT: thanks for the answers so far. I think some commercial units do work with passive tags at that distance (say, 5 meters), but I'll have to recheck.
Your current design employs passive tags. Those rfid tags are lit up by the scanner, and thus must be in very close proximity. There's nothing (that i know of) that will report its data passively over that distance.
Alternatives could be Bluetooth beacons or something bespoke, but that will require powering the tags... increasing cost and complexity of operation.
Edit: you can use computer vision approaches (like qr codes) if you have line of sight to each box. But that's not guaranteed if I interpret your problem correctly)
Edit 2: if you do use RFID but position the reader near the trunk opening and scan each box as it enters the trunk, you can keep a running total of the weight added to the car. That might strike the best cost/effort/result balance given these constraints...
After much research and brainstorming with my friend Jerry, I'm hitting on some tags from Chipolo. They're in the same league as AirTags and Tile, designed for consumers to find their lost items, not for industrial applications.
Much more expensive than a passive RFID tag, but the "reader" is just your phone, so that's an enormous win. And he only needs a few tags, which will be used over and over.
you could do a lot of things to reduce fan noise in your computer, but I appreciate this perspective. We constantly over-estimate how powerful a machine we need (probably because of the bad software we run) and underestimate how versatile and powerful a small SBC can be.
>Because I was done with the fan noise of my older and more powerful computer. After a while it felt as if a fighter jet was taking off next to me, constantly. I moved my old computer more away from me, but that wasn't enough.
:thinking: Feels like this could be fixed by some new fans, or at least an understanding of what GPU/CPU load is. Referencing "buying a new computer" just because of this is kind of overkill.
True, could have replaced the fans. Or better, try to replace them and break something (never assembled a computer, no experience here). I didn't want to spend money on new fans and a technician. Another problem was, I needed something working the next day. But the biggest thing was, I wanted to experience fanless. RPi4 made that possible and held up pretty good, which surprised me.
There are fanless full-PC builds, though that would probably require you to build your own computer. Parent's overall point is definitely true though, the idea that you have to go all the way down to a Pi to get a quiet computer is laughable. With a few fans and a decent heatsink you can cool hundreds of watts silently.
It seems you miss the point of my post. I had the thing lying around. And it is indeed laughable, I laugh my ass off since this little silent computer is still going strong, without me giving up too much of my workflow.
Hey, if it works, it works (sorry if my comment came off as snarky). For reference in the future, Noctua fans are typically a highly-rated cheap/quiet fan product.
I figure I could totally main a Raspberry Pi in a pinch. With Emacs and some programming tools, what more do you need? I'd have to budget browser tabs and I'm not going to edit 4K video or run some corpo enterprise microservice architecture on the thing, but it's still more than enough computer for many basic tasks and fairly significant programming.
If someone knows of a replacement that would work in a car that’s not $200 please let me know. Needs to run on 11-15v dc and not have a fan so I don’t destroy it when I hit a pothole. Needs to boot Linux and run a Java app.
I tried using it daily as you do, but youtube had stability issues in Chromium and Firefox for ages, so now I rarely use it. When it works, great, when not, I'm not spending any more time trying to figure out why.
it stands up to stress/linpack, I've the flirc case & and official adapter. It may be something to do with trying to accelerate video. Otherwise it has never crashed.
I suspect it's a compilation flag that this ubuntu distro has set correctly that RpiOS has not, I also see some about:config messing to try for another time.
I've had much better luck and performance using yt-dlp and mpv to watch YouTube videos on a Pi. It isn't an amazing experience as you would imagine but it is much better than trying to do it in the browser.
I tried this for a while. It was definitely a functional computer. What bothered me and made me buy a $300 mini PC instead was how long it took Chrome to render a website. On a normal computer, it's basically instant. On the Pi, it took a second for the page to fully load. It wasn't bad, but using the web was no longer a smooth experience which was VERY annoying.
I recently bought an Android TV Box (Quad-core, 4GB of RAM) just to see if I could use it as a remote terminal.
I turns out to be quite practical and fast. The only gotcha is that DNS doesn't work on the VPN and I have to log on to my company computer via its IP.
My feeling is that any little quad-core SBC with 8GB of RAM would be quite adequate for remote work and maybe most of my home needs.
I'm still sad about the price explosion :/ I know a lot of it is due to the foundation's decision to prioritize industry over education/hobby, but I remember being absolutely blown away I could get a full ARM-A based dev board for $5 and then, later, one with a BT/wifi for $10.
Both of those are specialized use cases by most people's definitions. For most of the uses of normal people, "daily use" is a good web browser and maybe a mail client, and the Pi should be more than capable of running those. A Pi is hardly a gaming rig or a dev box, and I don't think anyone would claim it is.
I run nvi+tmux under an OpenBSD netbook for C/AWK and Perl (sometimes TCL). If flies. No SSD. On gaming, I prefer Nethack/Slashem, IF and retroemulation. Or not, with Scummmvm.
I can always use the NUC at the living for games such as Jedi Academy or Jedi Outcast.
I just use the text editor that comes with Ubuntu Mate, it's called Pluma. I only play Mahjong and Solitaire on the thing. So nothing advanced compared to modern day capabilities. I only ask things from my RPi that I know it can perform, so with my software needs I had to adapt to this piece of hardware as well. I'm just surprised it held so well for over a year now.
(n)vim would work a real treat on a pi. Building locally might be tricky depending on the codebase, but it's not entirely unreasonable to expect to have a full fledged IDE on a pi (except Android development, lol)
> After a while it felt as if a fighter jet was taking off next to me, constantly.
as someone who spent time around jets in the US Air Force, I absolutely loathe this analogy.
The difference between a few computer fans and a jet taking off is like the difference in force between a dead leaf falling on you from 10m above you versus a 25kg anvil falling on you from 10m above you.
computer fans are annoying, sure. being 6ft away from a jet engine during takeoff will result in permanent and severe damage to your hearing, if not complete loss of hearing.
I worked with a guy who was an F-4 technician and can appreciate that perspective.
But from the perspective of a civilian, we only hear fighter jets when indoors or on the ground. The noise a fighter jet makes is nothing like a commercial airliner. But it is on par in terms of annoyances with the sound a laptop makes when it is maxed out thermally, if you're sitting in your house.
I know it isn't a "fighter jet" but recently the USAF passed a U2 basically right over my house. I was shocked to realize just how loud that plane is for example.
So the analogy makes sense. About the only other thing that is similar in annoyance is wood chippers.
The world is inundated with these over-the-top analogies now. People can't exaggerate just a little, they have to go full nuclear. And when dealing with a lot of sensitive subjects, it negatively affects a lot of people. I'm looking forward to a generation that swings the other way and goes super-literal on everything.
It was only about my own computer, no other people in this story. ;)
Since we are still talking about fighter jets, they should make the F-35 less noisy. The Netherlands have a bunch of them and the F-16 is as quiet as my RPi compared to them. Or does this analogy also rub you the wrong way?
I could probably use it for my daily programming environment - Elixir, PostgreSQL, Vim, Firefox.
But then my job takes a turn… creative. Document manipulation, convert multiple Images into a PDF, easy screenshots and then make a thumbnail with that. Sign docs with my signature. Access to apps like Pixemator. Share files easily. Dropbox. It’s just easier and more productive.
It’s hard to not have Mac Preview when you need it.
And that’s why I can’t finally switch over to Linux.
An no, Gimp is not an alternative. Dropbox alternatives are just more difficult to use. Just so many little things are missing.
To be fair, windows does not have a tool like Preview and that’s why I can’t use windows either.
I don't agree on the Dropbox part (bash script with rsync does the job for me) or the GIMP part (although I had some problems exporting as a proper PDF for professional printing tasks), but heavy creative work with audio/video would also drive me away from the RPi. I've been preparing for the day I have to leave my RPi because of changing work, but that day didn't come for over a year now and the RPi still runs.
Gimp can be tough for beginners. I always fumble around before watching a tutorial. Can be annoying having to watch a tutorial just to change the color of a layer.
I recently purchased a mini PC with an Intel N5105, 16GB of Ram, 512GB NVME SSD, two gigabit ethernet ports, two HDMI ports, many USB ports, and Wifi 6. This system was $180, all in. You can't find a Pi 4, much less one with equivalent specs for anywhere near this price. If you can find it, an 8GB PI4 is $75 and then you need to buy the case, power supply, sometimes storage, etc.
The N5105 system when under full load is only drawing 7 watts, I've seen it as low as 4 watts when idle. The Pi 4 uses a BCM2711, which according to Passmark, is about 4X slower than an Intel N5105.
I do think the PI is great from the hobbyist and industrial perspective, but to just use it as an inexpensive PC seems like a waste.