Posted by geerlingguy 3 days ago
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.
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?)
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.
Very different than, say, Germany. Power efficiency becomes a much lower priority.
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.
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.
The niche of the Pi5 just has gotten so much smaller, imo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This doesn't make sense, can you elaborate?
Are you getting confused by the 2040?
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.
Pineboard have a hat that fits in the official case. Only £9.
https://thepihut.com/products/hatdrive-nano-for-raspberry-pi...
[1]: https://thepihut.com/products/hatdrive-nano-for-raspberry-pi...
As soon as I need to use a web browser, performance goes out the window, and you're nearly stranded in terms of usability.
I think that easily qualifies as "desktop usage," and it leaves this desire for a low resource consumption web browser.
desire for a low resource consumption web browser.
What we really want is low resource consumption web content, right?When you pull up the browser's debugger and look at what a "modern" mainstream web page/app needs to deal with... you can see there's little hope for a low power device. Megabytes upon megabytes of obfuscated javascript, from multiple sources, nearly all of it needing decompression and decryption.
Using my Raspberry Pi 4
The Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) I recently got is actually very close to tolerable for web browsing and running VSCode.(I realize VSCode is kind of a pig. I'm just kind of experimenting to see what might be viable)
I run Firefox with uBlock, which seems to help somewhat. Total RAM usage with FF and VSCode according to htop is close to 4GB so I suspect that your 1GB Pi is running into swap once you start tooling around the interwebs with a web browser.
Upgrading from an A1 SD card to a A2 SD seems to make something of a palpable difference in "desktop usability." Certainly the benchmark scores for the A2 card blow the A1 away.
I've only had the Pi for a few weeks so I haven't experimented with more aggressive web optimization stuff, like switching my user-agent to request mobile versions or running a Pi-hole, etc. I'm also running at 4K native, so.... changing that certainly might help too....
But it's still all produced in the UK and shipping + customs fees easily rack up another 30% so it's at least as expensive as tickets for Taylor Swift.
And for any moderate use cases the need for any cooler at all could be disputed. I bet most RPi use cases don't include heavy computing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9ceI0_r_Kg
Alternatively you could get one of the NVMe boards that sits under the Pi, and put a standard PoE hat on top.
What is this hysteria?
In addition, replace most of the other ports (microUSB, etc...) with a number of USB-C ports.
https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-n2-with-4gbyte-ram-2/