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Comment by alexellisuk | Hacker News Reader

I know many of you may be wondering if you should get one of these, and if they can be used to create a cheaper cluster than RPi4s. I try to answer that as well as talk about my experience with the RPi Zero and how quick it is with Go and Node.js compared to the older generation.

Are you running Zeros now or other models? What would you run on an RPi Zero 2?

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My dream device for clustering is dual core 1Ghz+, 1GB ddr4 (ddr3 in a pinch) and wired Gb ethernet. In bulk (where bulk ~ 100) price $5-10. Some of the allwinner and rockchip based pi clones get close but price is a lot more.

You don’t ask for much ;)

You can hit this now with the CM4 modules,

For qty 1 @ $30 you get 2GB and 4 cores, you could put 2 more ethernet ports on the PCIe port for a total of 3. That gets you into the same-ish performance regime.

I am all for aggregates of low end compute, but I think something with more processing power and more PCIe lanes would scale better.

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/raspberry-pi/SC02...

Availability is a Real Issue, tho. 16-week leadtime on that URL.

16 weeks will come sooner than you realize. For other parts I need, I am seeing 40-60 week lead times.

Just a question on pi clustering in general. Is there an advantage vs buying a single more powerful computer, or a few powerful machines instead of a dozen+ pis?

Isn't this more of question on redundancy, ie: "two is one and one is none"? RPi's aren't technically best known for general purpose usage.

The big difference is number of cores you have to work with, and to a lesser extent the amount of RAM. For say 800€ you can get probably a 4 core CPU, maybe 8. I guess 8GB RAM? Or you can get 10 raspberry pi 4s for a total of 40 cores and 40GB RAM.

What makes more sense for you will depend on your workload and scaling requirements.

Nope, you build a RPI cluster for the sake of it.

Thanks for your RPi content Alex. Even though I'm not really active in the space, I still enjoy reading/watching about what's going on.

I run rpis in my house with an RTOS I wrote. It'll be nice to dump support of armv6 for space constrained use cases that I used a W.

Neat!

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