This is a nearly 10 year old manufacturing process and it’s silly to compare the performance per watt to any Intel or Arm chip on the market today. On such an old node, it’s not surprising that the power draw is so high. Of course an M2 would smoke a RP5 at a much lower power. But the RP5 is 60 bucks!
8nm, pretty power efficient. I've measured it to run at 0.7A@5V idle and 1.2A@5V with all 8 cores loaded with md5sum /dev/zero; iirc it had 1 ethernet connected, no other periphery. Running on Armbian.
A lot more computing power than the Pi 4 and older home server it replaced. The M.2 slot was an absolute game changer. Real onboard storage is a must.
It runs a few low resource VMs in the garage and I almost completely forget it exists.
arm64 has come a long way for that use case.
It's been solid as the VM host so far. I wrote an Armbian SD card and it just worked. Once a VM is booted though, many things become irrelevant outside of arm64 support.
I haven't tried again since February, so there's a decent chance my issues are fixed, but ZFS wouldn't build and VLAN support was disabled for the NIC. Not blockers, but it did make me rethink some ideas I had.