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Comment by teruakohatu | Hacker News Reader

> At this price point, it’s easy enough to throw one in your basket when you’re already spending a decent chunk of change and be done with it, safe in the knowledge that you have a well-performing boot device. I do still think it’s a bit naff that the M.2 HAT+ doesn’t fit in the official case but I won’t re-open that can of worms.

An rpi5 plus M.2 hat plus a branded ssd and you are well into the realm of Intel N100 SBC that don’t need a hat, have a good GPU with encoding/decoding and a lot of CPU power. I really don’t understand rpi anymore beyond the Zero, 2040 and CM range for commercial use.

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Power consumption is a good contender for reasons to stick with rpis. The rough, quick search numbers I'm seeing for idle power are ~6w for the N100 SCB and ~1 to 2w for the pi. Max performance is like ~15w to ~4w.

How often is that the case? Are you really saving so much more money with a 10W board vs a 15W system to offset the purchasing price?

It's like 1.5x longer run time on battery power :shrug:

Most things I see rpi being used for would be better done at 1/10 of the power with an ESP32, STM32 or arduino.

The things that need an rpi and therefore must use power from the wall anyway, I always find myself thinking would be better done by a minipc, eg one using a laptop cpu like a 7730U.

Costs more, but you get like 3-4x the speed at a similar power use, and have much more flexibility on what OS you can use because it's a "proper" PC.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of rPi. I have a Pi Zero that I've used exactly once because I wanted to do something and I came across a project that did exactly what I needed that used rPi.

I just find there's always a better option than rPi for every project I find myself doing.

How many PIs did you see in battery powered applications?

Is it really 1.5× longer in practice? The N100s are efficient, and you can simply choose a lower power profile by sending a different energy/performance preference to the CPU, and it finishes tasks quicker.

It's purely about battery runtime in these cases.

How many battery powered applications did you see use a pi?

Also, a bunch of GPIO if you want to control some hardware, not just run a Linux desktop or a media server.

We are starting to see SBCs that bake in an RP2040 to drive some GPIO pins (without needing to tie up a physical usb port), which seems like a reasonable compromise... I do like the RPi Zero size/perf/price combo, but for anything that needs more horsepower it's hard to argue with the bigger NUC-a-likes.

Yes there are N100 SBCs including a RP2040, so best of both worlds.

It’s not quite as seamless though, sadly, it’s just the same as having a Pico plugged in via USB but it’s a good step, even if the X4 (assuming that’s what we’re referring to) has some other flaws!

Especially when you want to work with PIO as well. Well, either way Raspberry Pi gets paid.

Do these give you decent performance DMA-able gpio and spi like you get even on a cheap rpi4? (I'm not claiming they don't/can't, just that it isn't immediately obvious to me that they would.)

For example, spi is an easy hack to bit sample a digital level and stream the results into memory for later processing. You can effortless do this at 20MHz+ plus on an rpi4. When you want to stream multiple digital levels simultaneously (in sync), DMA on gpio is a nice generalisation. (Could perhaps abuse I2S inputs too, which might be present on a more generic x86 board?)

I always wonder about a nice PCIe board supporting good DMAable gpio/spi/i2c/etc on standard x86 machines. I'd probably pay a fair amount of money for a quality one. But it's a product I've never seen on the market. Bodging a USB gpio interfaces with one of the relatively low spec chipsets seem like a pale, inefficient and high-latency imitation.

Actually, given the RP1, maybe the rpi5 has slow/non-DMA gpio too? I haven't been able to check it out yet as these boards still don't have mainlined linux support and I'm not up for buying toys that don't. (Am I imagining it, or did they used to be a lot better at mainlining support for their boards promptly?)

Depends on where you live then. My home state of Minnesota has electricity for 11 cents per kWh, with only 19% coal.

Very different than, say, Germany. Power efficiency becomes a much lower priority.

Wait, which raspberry pi are you talking about? Max performance on a rpi5 is closer to 20 watts technically, and a bit less than that usually because of thermals. But it's not 5 watts, at least nothing I've seen indicates that. The official rpi5 charger provides 5v5a, so 25 watts. And a lower power mode is used when a "standard" 15w charger is used.

> Max performance is like ~15w to ~4w.

Peak power from the Raspberry Pi 5 is 12W, according to Raspberry Pi themselves: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/

The N100 SBCs have a much higher peak power and heat, but it's also fine to let them throttle down.

Really though, I think most hobbyists would be perfectly fine with a base model 2GB RAM Raspberry Pi and a cheap USB to NVME enclosure. It's not optimal, but it works and you're not spending money to hot-rod something that will never be all that fast anyway.

I suspect you are describing a large part of consumer behavior.

Someone gets a sporty-car, then starts working on the engine, the suspension, the exhaust, gets new rims and tire, new seats...

and in the end they could have bought a porsche

Thing is, it all depends on your use case.

For the pi, it is lots better for hardware projects than a nuc style machine, via the gpios/csi/dsi. and specialized hats. There is also a huge community of forums/documentation/people to help you do new things, solve problems, get unstuck.

But if you are doing linux PC kinds of things, like a nas or a media server, you need to do the math.

Most hardware projects I tend to look at dont need the power of a Pi5 and are fine with a 2040 or zero.

The niche of the Pi5 just has gotten so much smaller, imo.

We've replaced most of our RPi units with the Beelink SER MAX 5 or whatever at $300ish price point; just too good of a deal (and all of its hardware works with Linux, unlike some other MiniPCs).

But we still use RPi4/5s when we want the ecosystem of the RPi, particularly around the GPIO stuff. Typical things include environment monitoring such as lighting and air quality - super simple plug-in devices that easily interface with Raspbian and the GPIO system.

Power draw is much lower on the RPis which I think is relevant for some people; not really us. But that's a pretty valuable use case for those who are shipping battery-backed devices.

Yep rpi5 does not make sense anymore. N100 goes for $110 on sale with 512gb nvme/16gb of ram/psu/case all included. It completely roasts rpi5 while staying with x64 Linux.

Really? Where?

Currently I’m seeing $120 for n100/16gb/512 on both eBay/aliexpress but I’ve seen it get cheaper.

Totally true. If you want a small server just get a N100.

The pi makes sense for something where you need power (eg more than esp32 or 2040) and gpio. Not as a small server. Those days are gone.

I’d argue they were never a particularly good option as a server, especially a file server, because of their poor IO. You’d often get better performance by installing Linux on a NAS. Ironically the Pi5 is the only one that is actually ok at being a file server. Pis are very good at being lots of other things though.

The Pi 4 still makes sense for 35$ if your use case doesn't require power but still requires something more featured than a esp32 or rp2040. Most of my Pis are either video displays or 3d printer controllers, so I'll keep getting Pi 4s for these. Maybe the 3A+, I like the form factor of that one.

Oh yeah if you like the 3A+ you might even be able to get away with the Zero 2W, it has the same chip. And it's even cheaper.

I don't mind spending a bit more for the 3A+ to not have to deal with the adapters like microUSB to USB-A host ports for my 3D printers. Or for video displays having Ethernet and full-sized HDMI. I do have a Zero 2W just in case, but for my current use cases I just like the 3A+ more.

Ah I see that makes sense! The adapters are indeed a big annoyance with the zeros. The 3A+ doesn't have ethernet either though (like none of the A models).

While there is some commercial/industrial use of RPi, that seems like an odd consideration when generally considering how they've positioned the brand. Meanwhile you can write and run very similar code across everything from the zero all the way up to the 5—which is enormous flexibility that x86 simply doesn't offer.

Plus, my understanding is that the N100 still tends to have poor driver support issues that the Pi likely doesn't with such a large community.

>While there is some commercial/industrial use of RPi

I thought the whole reason for the shortages the last few years was due to commercial applications buying out most of the Pi's available?

> I thought the whole reason for the shortages the last few years was due to commercial applications buying out most of the Pi's available?

Sure, but that's not why people find raspberry pis interesting or valuable.

> Meanwhile you can write and run very similar code across everything from the zero all the way up to the 5—which is enormous flexibility that x86 simply doesn't offer.

This doesn't make sense, can you elaborate?

Every raspberry pi, from Zero, Zero W, Zero 2 (great name guys), Pi 1, Pi 2, Pi 3, Pi 4, Pi 5 and every variation are all general purpose linux computers that can run pretty much any code you can run on a normal linux computer. They are all the same compilation target IIRC. If you wrote a program for the original Pi, you could have run it on every other Pi without modification or recompilation, depending on peripheral specifics I guess.

Are you getting confused by the 2040?

I am not at all confused by a microcontroller. I am confused because what you said about the pi can be said about x86.

it's a known quantity with known good support for various things and a large community.

People and particularly businesses want to buy something they know works, rather than trying to change and figure out new configuration nuances every time something with a slightly better looking spec sheet comes out.

I agree - I've got a couple of N100 micro PCs that have replaced Raspberry Pi devices at home. One of them is running Home Assistant and a bunch of addons, and the other is my Plex server. Both of them have more than enough power and super easy to add more RAM or storage.

One issue I have with a lot of the N100 systems is there seems to be a lot of variants from different manufacturers, slightly different form factors, etc. The PI may be worse but at least you have a pretty good idea what you are actually getting most of the time.

One example: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2024/07/radxa-x4-cheap-intel-n10...

I started down this thought path and ended up with a pair of reconditioned DL369 G9s.

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