one big advantage pi had over minipc is a lot of the minipcs are in the 30 watt range while the early pis were single digit watts. that advantage has decayed over time though...
Also notably there are some low power options too. My first kube cluster was on these nice 2014 Acer Chromebox cxi's; they idled at 6w! Crazy slow 2957u Celeron processor, but I used it a node as my desktop for ~2 years (with 16GB ram). But it had gobs of USB bandwidth, mpcie wifi, sata, gigabit, and if i'd sprung for i3 models it probably would have been downright pleasant to use versus the 1.6GHz no turbo dual core I was getting.
Personally I've avoided the atom cores generally, but there's been a variety of decent low power offerings of big cores for a while. Heck, my Ultrabook tablet is ~6W when running, with screen on, with a i5-7200u. 15W TDP core with some additional TDP up available.
Point is, there's been a range of pretty low power x86 offerings. Just, not always super obvious.
I can't measure values below 10W myself, but with 2 SSDs and 8GB RAM it never goes above that value, even under full load.
[0] https://github.com/R3NE07/Futro-S740/blob/main/power_consump...
The nice thing about n100 Is its ability to disable the iGPU in the bios, saving you a little bit of power. But you have to reset the bios on the board to regain any output if you might need it later.
It is great that something on par is so affordable & even lower power though! And what I bought was a value because it was used, where-as now you can buy new. It's felt like the atom lineup was kind of slow rolling things & there hasnt been much availability for cheap AMD systems. These low price low power e-cores systems have really changed the game, have expanded the value proposition a lot versus the used-x86 mini PC or io limited ARM market's long stalemate.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/103253
E.g., Apple M2 Pro chip, 32GB unified memory, 8TB SSD.
What is your source? Because, according to the link shared by op, they can consume up to 50W or 100W depending on the model.
Remember: single-core, ARMv6Z 32b, 700 mhz in-order, using USB 2.0 as a system bus and booting over that same shared 500mbps-unidirectional system bus, with 256mb memory. Versus dual-core x86 64b 1580 MHz out-of-order with a proper SOC design, and also having dedicated USB 3.0 for peripheral connectivity, with 2GB memory.
For say $80-100 loaded on a rpi vs $100-125 on a Liva/Liva X it was a no-brainer even at the time, and the liva still sipped power (because it was using e-cores). The 1B+ model improved things a little (512mb) but still, not a good showing for a product that competed directly with these x86 nettop machines.
And in the grand scheme of things... 1w idle/5w load vs 3w idle/12W load is not anything you're really going to notice, especially given the massive increase in performance it afforded.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/8262/ecs-liva-review-the-nett...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/8883/ecs-liva-x-review-a-fanl...
https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-Celeron%20N2807...
https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-Celeron%20N2808...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Specifications
https://docs.rs-online.com/6403/0900766b8127da4b.pdf
Rpi team had great marketing. But it wasn’t the only game in town even back then. Nettops existed for a long time. They just didn't have the full-court press in the glossies.
also, booksizes/nettops didn't materialize into existence in 2014 either. and you have to remember that the raspberry pi 2 didn't launch until 2015, so actually they were direct contemporaries for at least a year.
so if you wanted to run the early-adopter softfp distro on a $35[0] SBC in 2012 then sure, I agree, go for it. But there were turnkey solutions in the x86 space that weren't that much more expensive.
[0] $35 + $20 case + $15 adapter + $20 SD card + $20 SD card + $10 SD card + ....
Sure, it would have a case and WiFi in that price.
It would also miss GPIO header, which was major selling point of initial Raspberry Pi efforts (before it became so popular for other uses, when it was still targeting education).
A lot of then-common phone chargers worked. A random SD card wasn't that much of an issue. A kit with charger, NOOBS SDcard, and random assortment of extra bits to play with the electronics regularly could be acquired for ~100 USD if not less.
If I wanted to play with small-size BayTrail x86, Liva was fine choice. If I needed a small general purpose computer, too.
Not a very good choice if I wanted to graduate from Arduino towards somewhat more capable setup without requiring either expensive I/O boards or hacking an IO board out of Arduino or another MCU.
https://i.imgur.com/dnJACSd.png (these had a $25 rebate)
these were $115 barebones iirc (add SSD and memory). https://www.servethehome.com/zotac-zbox-bi320-u-w2-review-so...
$180 loaded for the whole thing (and this is indicative of what I paid for ssd+memory at the time, etc) https://i.imgur.com/9nmBQ0V.png https://i.imgur.com/I98CS6i.png
like idk what to say dude but MSRP reviews aren't always reflective of street prices back then, things used to go back on clearance sales before moore's law died.
yes, you absolutely could get x86 stuff that was price-competitive with the rpi once you loaded it up. the $35 price is, as I have stated, a red herring considering all the stuff that nobody had on-hand in 2012 like proper usb chargers that could run a rpi stable, plus the massive kernel problems involved for the first few years.
It's $100 loaded cost for a raspberry pi 1b or 1b+ that doesn't even work, because of kernel bugs I already linked, or just buy x86 for $75-180 and get something an order of magnitude faster that actually works and runs standard x86 distros and drivers. Stop comparing 1/3 of a pc to a out-of-the-box pc as if the price means anything at that point, this is getting to be bad-faith.
Especially when the product didn’t fucking work.
Like it’s the same damn story as ROCm, right? People want serious financial consideration as if they have delivered a working product, minus the delivering the working product. Come back in 5 years when your product works.
I will sell you a brick with a piece of paper that says “10,000 tflops” taped to it. The perf/$ will be out of this world, but there will be some “usability issues”. PM me for details.