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So SBCs are shit now? Anything I can do with my collection of Pis and old routers? (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I dunno when it happened but I swear SBCs were the new best thing in the universe for a while and everyone was building cool little servers with their RockPis and OrangePis.

Now it's all gone x86 and Proxmox with everyone shitting on Arm. What happened? What gives?

Is my small army of xPis pointless? What about my 2 Edge routers?

I've got about 6 xPis scattered round my flat - is there anything worth doing with them or should I just bin them?

All thoughts, feelings and information welcome. Thank you.

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[–] 48 points 2 years ago (7 children)

The price is what happened. A pi 5 costs almost as much as an old used computer.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago* (6 children)

    This exactly. If you already have Pis they are still great. Back when they were $35 it was a pretty good value proposition with none of the power or space requirements of a full size x86 PC. But for $80-$100 it's really only worth it if you actually need something small, or if you plan to actually use the gpio pins for a project.

    If you're just hosting software a several year old used desktop will outperform it significantly and cost about the same.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago* (4 children)

    less so with TCO considering the power budget...laptops however..

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    The Pi 5 isn't very power efficient. X86 CPU's from a few years ago were already on a more efficient process node

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You're quite right about the Pi 5 power efficiency, an Alder Lake N100 / i3 will smoke it in ops / watt given the right board, but the context was 'a several year old used desktop' which the Pi will handily beat.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago*

    Depends on what it's doing. The Pi5 has lower idle power usage but if it's under constant load it's actually very inefficient. Keep in mind that the Pi5 has a 25W max TDP, almost as high as the N100.

    The reason that the N100 is seems less efficient in Jeff's video is because it's clocked a lot higher. And power usage increases exponentially with higher clockspeeds

    The Pi5 is made on the 28nm node, which is from around 2011. Of course it has other efficiency improvements like the GPU and the ARM architecture, but pound for pound I don't think the Pi5 even beats a 6 year old desktop in efficiency if the desktop was properly downclocked and not running some inefficient HDD's or the likes.

    Rockchip boards on the other hand are made on 22nm, which is why they tend to be a bit more efficient.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    True. I did some rough math when I needed to right-size a UPS for my home server rack and estimated that running a Pi4 for a year would cost me about $8 worth of electricity and that running an x86 desktop would cost me about $40. Not insignificant for sure if you're not going to use the extra performance that an x86 PC can offer.

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