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Comment by bullen | Hacker News Reader

The Raspberry 2 (original ARMv7 not underclocked Raspberry 3 ARMv8) is the best low power server. 1W idle and 2W 100% (6x more perf. than Raspberry 1 = Zero with Eth.).

They saturate the SD card SPI almost to the byte/second.

32-bit is enough forever, specially when you only have 1GB, but I'm staying on 32-bit on my 8GB RPi 4 too, because 4GB per process is enough when you also need the OS to have ample RAM.

If you are lucky enough to have some ARMv7 RPi 2 and/or Rpi 4 8GB, they will be priceless for eternity.

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The RPi 2 is the unpopular kid of the familly, I don't know why. Maybe it got erased pretty quickly by the Pi3 performances and Wifi capabilities.

The thing I don't understand tho, is why they didn't chose this Soc for the Pi Zero original, instead of using the already decade-old ArmV6 CPU.

They can't, the RAM was external which wouldn't fit on the one sided Zero.

Thus why they bounded the 512MB ram in the package for Zero 2.

Physical limits are now everything you'll see until the end of time.

8GB is the largest RAM you will ever get in one chip.

1TB is the largest Micro SD.

Etc.

A Pi Zero can go down to 0.5W idle. The Pi Zero 2W should also be good, but is very hard to obtain right now.

The original BCM2837 was a terrible chip because the cooling is of old style so the PCB can't transport enough heat away and the package was plastic insulating from an eventual heat-sink. The Pi 3+ and 4 changed that.

BCM2836 is the real deal, peak SoC for non GPU + SD card duty:

https://wikimovel.com/index.php/Broadcom_BCM2836

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A7

> 32-bit is enough forever, specially when you only have 1GB, but I'm staying on 32-bit on my 8GB RPi 4 too, because 4GB per process is enough when you also need the OS to have ample RAM.

I thought 32-bit limited the entire system to 4GB of memory (all processes + kernel), not just per process?

That wasn't really true with PAE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension Well that's the x86 extension, ARM has a similar extension called Large Physical Address Extension.

As mentioned in that article, Windows limited it to 4GB if you weren't running Server Enterprise, but Linux generally has it enabled by default.

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