The Raspberry Pi 5 Is No Match for a Tini-Mini-Micro PC
louwrentius.com
louwrentius.com
The only reason they don't cost $500 or more is because the foundation needs the hobbyist market to write and support the open source BSP, without which the RPi would be just another poorly supported also-ran in an already crowded market. With how well supported mainline Linux is on the Pi, EEs would be willing to pay a lot more.
Broadcom, having never wanted anything to do with this market since volumes were too low, had an abundance of a CPU SKU that was good for this. So some broadcom engineers founded Raspberry Pi to use up this excess stock, essentially getting these chips for free. The original RPi blew every other SBC out of the water on price performance (and many manufacturers out of the market) because by getting the most expensive component for free, they could sell Pis for an extremely low price. It also massively expanded the market for SBCs, as hobbyists flooded in to work with RPis.
5-10 years ago, the sweetheart deal with Broadcom went away. Now Raspberry Pi has to compete with everyone else for Broadcom SoCs, and during the semiconductor shortage of 2020, Broadcom had tremendous leverage. Now, Raspberry Pi pricing is nothing special, but they still have the brand name and they have captured the community (on the back of behavior that was borderline anticompetitive).
The two pieces that have to be in place, as 'threshold' requirements are
1) The SBC exists and is available from a manufacturer
2) The same manufacturer provides an OS for that board and its associated board support package (BSP) which is drivers for all the I/O and system support functions.
The industry is full of people who went out of business because they chose Vendor A's SBC and Vendor B's OS, only to fail to deliver when it didn't work with Vendor A and Vendor B point at the other saying it was their problem. So people just don't do that any more.
What most vendors in the SBC space, prior to the introduction of the Raspberry Pi, didn't have was 20 to 30 thousand programmers writing random bits of code. What that meant was the Pi's feature set exploded rapidly, what's more there were lots of free tutorials on programming it.
In the SBC space before Pi that "Programmer Training" was one of the ways the vendor made better margins at $500/hr for a class of "up to 15 students" at our facilities.
So before, higher priced SBC + BSP, and you had to send your programmers on a road trip to the vendors facility to get the hands on training, and then you had to pay every time you made a service request.
After, cheap SBC + BSP!, a bunch of different programming videos on the web for free! Program doesn't work? Just ask the community of enthusiasts what they think!
We are not surprised a whole lot of the smaller SBC vendors closed down after that.
It will be interesting to see if the RISC-V efforts will allow for vendors to supply "50 year" SBCs (which is to say they are guaranteed to have pin-for-pin and bug-for-bug replacement SBCs for the period of 50 years.) That was a weapon system requirement back in the day that got waived for electronics because vendors couldn't "force" chip makers to keep making the chips they would need for repairs when there was no volume. But if you can define a socket/footprint and then drop in an FPGA "core" which can evolve but always appears to the circuit to be the same processor, that will be an interesting evolution point.
Before RPi became really popular and the 4 came out, I used BeagleBoard, PandaBoard, Aria G25, Gumstix, Cubieboard, i.MX devkits, and spun custom boards using Marvell, TI, Freescale (now NXP), and Qualcomm CPUs - I don't remember any of them having as good a BSP or being as easy to develop with as the RPi was five years ago. Maybe my memory is (very) faulty but the experience was leagues worse. PTSD-inducing level of worse. I wasted weeks or months on every major project shaving silicon yaks that should have been handled by the vendor (and is now handled by the RPi community).
The modern i.MX toolchain may now be comparable many years later but I've long since given up on everything else since CM4 came out in 2020.
My understanding is that they lost the sweetheart deal after they pivoted to supporting commercial, right in time for the pandemic supply crunch.
Two products.. leveraged a Yocto-based board support package (BSP); one being in AgTech, and the other being in the veterinary space. These products have followed disparate practices when leveraging the BSP for custom hardware and software.. this talk [described] the two products, how the BSP was customized and used, and the resulting consequences.*Source: have worked on both Pi based solutions and custom hardware with yocto.
And you still can! The big innovation from Raspberry Pi was making it all feel very accessible through the documentation, community, and various utilities to configure things via menus instead of by editing files.
The Raspberry Pi was rarely the best board, but it was the easiest to recommend to beginners because you could point them to volumes of documentation and community threads.
I switched to the cheaper Intel mini pcs when RPi supplies were short, and scalping made it much more expensive. A whole PC with more ram, case, psu and faster storage that was faster for under $200 vs $150+ for an 8GB RPi 4 board only was a no brainer.
> by getting the most expensive component for free
I get that you're exaggerating, and you perhaps aren't trying to be deceptive by misusing the word "free," but the low markup the RPi guys initially paid to Broadcom does not explain as much as you think it does about the Pi's success. To explain why let's examine something else you're wrong about:
> You could get a lot of different kinds of boards with good Linux support and a not terrible price. Often, a processor vendor would explicitly provide support for these things because it was a good vector for selling chips.
Prior to the Pi you could get one board with good Linux support and a not terrible price from a vendor who provided support because they thought it was a good vector for selling chips. That was the BeagleBoard, from TI. I mean, the BB barely checked all those boxes: the support wasn't very good, it was kind of nonexistent compared to the support community the Raspberry Pi people created. But they sure didn't have to worry about the cost of the CPU.
So back to the original point: getting the CPU "for free" (since we're apparently just saying "free" now when we mean "at cost") wasn't a decisive advantage for the Raspberry Pi people, since the TI people had the same advantage. TI had a few other advantages as well, like a first mover advantage, their own assembly lines, and relationships with everyone who sells electronics components.
TI's support was crap when compared to something like RPi which deliberately targeted newbies, and as far as I remember they didn't have a few amazing people in their community dedicated to making a whole new spin of Debian and supporting it like RPi did. And, you know, PR matters. All that stuff is what made the difference.
> anticompetitive
I guess we're just throwing words around without caring what they mean today for some reason.
Broadcom sold the chips to the Raspberry Pi organization at a significant loss, not at a low markup or at cost. They were not free, but they were close to free. The TI guys never even gave anything close to "at cost" to the BeagleBoard folks.
Also, the BeagleBoard was the most hobbyist-targeted and the one with the best PR. There were, and still are, tens of companies making SBCs, but before the RPi they would all sell you singe unit quantity. Not any more. Most of them actually had better support than TI. The NXP boards in general were and still are my favorites.
Also, providing a product at a loss so that it significantly undercuts your competition (also called "dumping") is very much anticompetitive. I don't like using the term for Raspberry Pi because they clearly weren't out to create a monopoly, but the Raspberry Pi was dumping a product.
Everything in that paragraph is “citation needed,” unfortunately, but I certainly don’t mean that in a negative way. I wasn’t aware that Broadcom lost money on the early Pi parts and I feel a little skepticism about that. You seem to know something about what TI charged the Beaglebone people, I’m curious about that as well.
It’s not that dumping parts to establish a competitive advantage is beneath Broadcom - what’s beneath Broadcom? It just seems rather… prescient of them? Unless you were talking about the Pi 3 generation or something. I’d be more inclined to believe that.
On the point of PR, I don’t remember Beagleboard having anything comparable to Pi’s seemingly organic enthusiasm twelve or thirteen years ago. But I guess I’m not sure I would remember.
That’s not all meant to be some kind of RPi love letter. They were great at all that community building stuff, and in my view the best at it, but in light of the IPO it’s quite a joke.
You perhaps aren't trying to be deceptive by misusing the word "markup," but citation please for /any/ "markup the RPi guys initially paid to Broadcom"
Regardless, any basis of your "low markup" would suffice to show markup was non-zero.
...though given this is HN I would have to concede low could be zero! :)
Maybe there was a market of cheap and friendly to use sbc. But calling it hobbyst is an stretch.
For example, I owned an ECS Liva 2/32 that I got for $100 AR and a pair of ECS Liva X 2/32 that I got for $125 each AR. These used standard N2807 and N2808 Bay Trail-D processors (Silvermont), meaning they are OoO, run standard x86 binaries and distributions, come with storage onboard (which was far more reliable than the early days of fullsize SD cards), a proper adapter, a case, and USB 3.0, for essentially the same price you paid for a Raspberry Pi 1B once you factored in all the little extras.
Obviously if you want to do GPIO and stuff, the RPi is a better option, but that also competes with micros, as mentioned. And a lot of people ended up using it for some variety of non-GPIO IOT thing attaching some USB device to wifi/ethernet, or as a NAS, etc, and the Pi was terrible at these. It had massive reliability problems (unthinkable today) and I went from incredibly excited to bouncing off it hard and learning a lesson about the right tool for the job, and I think I wasn't alone.
Part of the problem was the decision to use USB 2.0 as a system bus. Everything including network and disk all hung off a single half-duplex USB 2.0 high-speed bus. And the Rpi firmware had a bug in the USB stack which dropped frames under load, so actually this was unreliable and could lead to corruption all on its own. It took over 2 years after launch for the foundation to fix this fundamental bug in the literal system bus of their hardware (and thanks to broadcom's closed documentation/blobs, they were the only ones who could see the info to fix it).
https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/19
On top of that, people forget about the non-micro-SD card slot. The fullsize slot just let the card cantilever out into space... but the thermoplastic used to make SD cards actually will soften enough from the heat of the rpi over time to warp away from the contacts and lose connection. Even just stepping up to eMMC (not the most reliable) was a massive step upwards because of how bad the Pi was at not melting its SD cards.
And the power adapter situation has always been dire - most USB chargers were utterly unable to provide consistent enough power to avoid brownouts and corruption, and (while you could PXE boot) the hardware was not even capable of PXE booting without at least a helper SD card to load from. Today, it's dire once again, with the Pi 5 drawing 5A @ 5V from the adapter, which essentially no adapter on the market is capable of delivering.
The 2B and later models (especially 4B) are enormously faster, the move to OoO cores instead of literal a single-core A57 or whatever improved performance a ton. The change to USB 3.0 (5gbps full-duplex vs 480mbps half-duplex) and getting the USB frame drop bug fixed helped a ton (the pi couldn't even serve a usb hard drive at full speed). And the 4B moved to armv8 which has a drastically clearer standard for binaries than the armv7 situation, which was an utter mess at the start (softfp binaries were a thing for a bit with the early 1B releases iirc!). Admittedly Pi was better than any other arm device but the Liva just ran debian or ubuntu.
I actually think it was an utter failure as a product. I cannot imagine having to maintain a whole computer lab of these things melting (softening+warping) the SD cards, can't even PXE boot unassisted, can't get good adapters? Let alone the situation with firmware problems/driver quality and needing (at the time) weird binaries with a non-standardized bootloader etc. Why would you buy that instead of the Liva X for the same finished price?
The pivot to "these are for makers!" was a pivot, and then they pivoted again into commercial. Like good for them but it's always been a messy product with an uncertain target market.
It was always borne largely on the backs of enthusiasts shoving it into various home-server and IOT usage, most of which didn't actually need a GPIO. And the GPIO thing was always better served by the ESP8266 in most situations, and that ecosystem really matured almost in parallel with the Rpi. So sure, while the Pi got more suitable for actual GPIO hobbyism over time, so did everything else too. I regard the whole thing as fundamentally having been overhyped and a waste of time by people who (in most circumstances) really should just have bought a booksize or an off-lease OEM USFF desktop.
That was me. Got an old Core2Duo desktop for $10 at a surplus sale, that became the fileserver I was trying to build, which instantly ended the reliability struggle I'd been having (rpi lasted an average of 1-2 months MTBF in my homeserver usage) then I got a couple booksize and nettops and ended up with NUCs etc which are just a far better fit for what I'm trying to do.
To each their own, but again, I think really very few people are interested in them for the GPIO stuff, it's the "$35 for a little computer" thing that draws people in, but that's an impedence mismatch to expectations, that's not why you should buy a rpi/if that's your use-case then there are better options.
I also like your perspective on the bigger picture here.
The Raspberry Pi 5's base model does start at $60 but its specs are too different for a comparison to be meaningful.
[EDIT] Oops, I hadn't realized the 4B with 1 GB was discontinued. So the starting price of the 4B would be $45 for the 2 GB version.
The pi is fun but honestly for pi hole or similar you might as well buy the all in one x86. For media streaming definitely buy the all in one x86. For gpio stuff ok the pi is reasonable but even then if you want to make a product rather than a home automation once off you’d go a different route completely.
Of course, the Pi is also facing competition from higher end microcontroller based solutions. People seem to forget that there was a time when hobbyists bought the Pi for "Internet of Things" like projects, both due to its cost and size. Then came the ESP8266 and ESP32 and development boards that packaged both a microcontroller and network interface.
Most makers I know have pivoted to ESP32 during this time as it was good enough and actually available. Probably would have happened sooner or later though.
I'm willing to pay a little more for a respected brand with a little more QA involved (and less hassle to me as a developer).
It bugs me to no end how much a small (4-drive) nas can cost, compared to much more capable mini-pc prices.
Options with mainline linux kernel drivers:
- MCP2221A (i2c + 4x GPIO)
- CP2112 (i2c + GPIO)
Options without kernel support:
- FT232H
- Arduino nano and clones
- Raspberry Pi Pico running some interesting firmware
- ESP32 running something like ESPHome (completely separate from host)
I've chosen the Pico for now and forked the u2if project for firmware and host support[1]. I also put together a generic ESPHome-compatible protocol server in python to tie my widgets to Home Assistant[2].
In terms of driver support these intel systems are the easiest to work with in Linux. Very mainstream and well established drivers.
Requirements may vary.
The power brick got more expensive due to the increased power use. Also if you want to make use of the full power, you need a cooler. But you can also do without cooler, because it just gracefully slows down when overheated.
I think the Pi drove the price of lower end computers down so far that people completely lost their sense of perspective.
Hey now. Proud owner of a 256MB 1B here. Although they upgraded the baseline spec right after that first production run.
Is it? I can buy one for $35 at my local Microcenter, and I can see that Adafruit is selling them for $35 as well. [0] It's still listed as a $35 part on the official Raspberry Pi product page. [1]
[0] https://www.adafruit.com/product/4295
[1] https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/
For those unfamiliar with them, Digi-Key is a electronic components supplier to manufacturers but they also sell to individuals. Their stock count should be accurate.
Are you talking about the Pi5 4GB which is $60? We are talking about the Pi4 2GB which is $45. For many things, the cheaper, older version is fine.
The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is available right now for $15 with a 1 GHz 64 bit quad core CPU and 512 MB RAM.
So it seems to me that you can get a Raspberry Pi SBC today, that has higher or equal specs in every regard, for a lower cost than the original. Am I missing something?
Looking at https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux, I scrolled a few pages of commits and didn't even see one from outside the Raspberry Pi org. I'm picking through their merged PRs and it looks like maybe there are a couple, it's hard to tell.
But it looks to me like they just do a great job supporting their own product?
It’s just supporting whoever needs a RPi 1st generation. It’s the same reason some older models of things cost the same or more, it’s basically fishing for the “we need the exact same hardware” customer.
The Pi Zero models are also kind of priced to move to make a statement of “look how much power we can stuff in a $5 board”; IIRC they were at first sold at a small loss to hit that $5 price point.
Raspberry Pi 5 isn’t as well supported in mainline. You’re still going to be using their kernel if you want all the features, just like many other module these days.
> The only reason they don't cost $500 or more
$500 is a huge exaggeration. There are numerous modules and small boards well under that price that come with good support, including many with full x86-64 CPUs.
I think it’s more correct to say that the boards are approaching equilibrium with other boards and modules in price, not that they’re secretly some premium $500 product sold at a discount for reasons. Nobody would be buying Raspberry Pi anything at $250, let alone $500.
They’ve got a full product line now, including systems that are comparable in cost but much more capable than the original Raspberry Pi.
This is one of the main advantages for hobbyists.
I am surprised by all of the comments here that assume Raspberry Pi has great upstream support. It’s amazing that people just assumed their boards were working great with upstream kernels. Raspberry Pi has a history of doing nonstandard things that serve their community but are actually a little bit quirky when it comes to normal embedded Linux.
0: yeah, I know you can run it in theory; I mean in a usable way.
They kinda work if the system is not mission critical. Just have them self reboot every 4 hours :)
this is sort of sad. I remember reading advice given to the raspberry folks early on to keep things inexpensive, not cave into feature creep.
I guess now the price creeps upwards and the original target market has been left behind.
It's not a great choice if you're hoping to productize from it, for various reasons.
If you're not using the GPIO or any of the ribbon cable peripherals there are much better options out there. But a Pi will be able to do things those machines never will.
For the price, you get massively more CPU power, 3x the number of easily connectable NVMe devices, at higher bandwidth each, 22x (!) the network bandwidth, and the ability to connect a real multi-lane PCIe card of your choice.
I still find it sad that NVMe is an afterthought in the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. SD is convenient, but it’s also slooooow, and it holds back a lot of raspberry pi use cases. The new-to-RPi5 official NVMe support still seems really awkward in the way it interferes with the overall thermal performance and the way it interferes with the IO header if you use the official board.
That doesn't really change my point that they are comparing the Pi to a PC that costs 4 - 8 times more (and in a much larger formfactor), so it's not surprising that it's faster.
It's 25x, the copper ports are 2.5g. It's even more if you use the usb-4 ports for ip over thunderbolt.
Doesn't change the "[places] where a Pi will fit but these micro PCs won't" assertion but the pricing and sizing are not as egregious as you're suggesting.
Of course, if you size and the ability to interface with other hardware via GPIO is the primary use - then yeah a SBC like a Rpi would be the better option. But for a small home server, one is better off just buying a mini-PC.
https://t.ly/S-OW6 (shortened Amazon link)
Now the 4020 isn't certainly a monster, but I can assure you it's way more performant than a RPi. Also, bear in mind that, as is the case with many Chinese products, those mini PCs are produced in huge quantities and sold under at least a dozen different ever changing "brands". Don't let the name "Wo-We" make you think this is something deemed to disappear in a few months; the name could certainly be thrown away but the product will most certainly reincarnate under another "brand".
I guess it’s subsidized by the malwares that come preinstalled.
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-raspberry_pi_5_b_b...
Don't let the name "Wo-We" make you think this is something deemed to disappear in a few months; the name could certainly be thrown away but the product will most certainly reincarnate under another "brand".
Does that matter? If it dies in 2 months and I can't find the manufacturer because it's operating under a different name now, is that any different than if the manufacturer folded completely?
No one's gonna recommend an ancient middling mini-PC that costs vastly more than a modern current mini-PC.
Either go on the secondary market & get this old PC for under $100. Or go get some modern Ryzen mini-PC for $500. Or a decent n100 for somewhere in between, especially if you insist on new for some reason.
In particular I’m using the GPIO pins to drive the LCD display showing solar stats and a relay to disable/enable the inverter.
> Empowering young people to use computing technologies to shape the world
With a link to learning resources. So the article is true but beside the point: the Pi 5 is no match for something the Pi isn’t even aiming to be.
But then I'd wonder what you're building because there are powerful microcontrollers you can buy for $15/1 that will handle anything with basic networking and sensors. I know some musical synthesizers are made with rPi4 and I'm befuddled that they're not the most powerful synths ever made.
I think they oddest one out is the Arduino line, which is generally underpowered and expensive compared to just having a drawer of esp32s sitting around.
Also, Arduino as I think you're using it here is really just slang for AVR microcontroller dev boards.
Arduino isn't actually that, it's a boot loader and a highly simplified set of libraries to interact with a wide variety of microcontrollers including ESP-32 and what people traditionally think of as "Arduino" meaning the branded dev boards labelled that way.
Of course the whole Arduino ecosystem is basically garbage, but it does help beginners get into the idea of doing embedded things.
I think this is either a naive take or a presumptuous, Gatekeeping take. The Arduino ecosystem is not garbage. It’s an abstraction layer. While it is not always the most efficient code, it makes programming something straightforward. That is not only a beginner feature.
The premise that’s sold here is that because Arduino is an abstraction layer and it does (often) favor ease over efficiency and compactness, it must not be suitable for “real embedded programmers”
Not all projects need to be accomplished in 256 bytes of flash. Not all programmers care about how to set a given timer or stepping down clock speed. Not all use cases are your use cases
Use the tools that get the job done. Make the thing you want to make. Ignore people who tell you you’re doing it “wrong”.
Getting started with esp32 dev board is cheaper, more powerful, and not any harder, so I don't understand their niche.
I've got a guy who loves running these things, but calls me every other month because one of his images fails, and he needs help rebuilding it. So far I doubt he's saved himself any effort, time or money.
A) muck around with the boot settings file (though I think recently they can do that in the flasher) or B) find a mouse, keyboard, monitor
Then, as a beginner who likely doesn't already, learn Linux and beyond that embedded Linux, then learn the languages and environment (the amount of times people have told me their task was to get the project's code started on boot is astounding), networking, drivers, etc etc etc.
You're telling me that's 1000x more approachable than the 1 line of
digitalWrite(BUILTIN_LED, 1); // because Arduino will set the output mode for you I believe
It takes on an Arduino? Which boots immediately every time, no sd card corruption issues, no anything, just runs the code?
Another very similar alternative with support for 32g memory and dual channel is the Dell wyse 5070 https://github.com/pflavio/Dell-Wyse-5070-Home-Server/wiki
These can be brought used for around 60-80€ on eBay.
For about 150€ you can buy new Intel n100 mini computers on Ali express with similar low idle power but vastly better top performance.
Their physical size is smaller than a Raspberry Pi with case, and performance is more than twice a RPi5. And you get full x86 software compatibility. Idle power is around 4-5W measured from the wall.
If you need GPIO, the Pi is the obvious choice.
I end up with multiple N100 systems and a single RaspberryPi.
I've had 3 of the old H2 series and I really love them...
I find it easier to write real-time code on the MCU.
In fact, I've disciplined myself to make all of my projects -- hardware and software -- capable of running on any modern platform. It turns out that's not hard to do.
There are so many USB GPIO modules that I don't think the Pi is so "obvious." Plus if you blow out your USB GPIO, replacement is a far easier thing to consier.
rPi's defining use case is as a microcontroller, it can also serve as just a computer but it most definitely isn't optimized for that.
And the PI has many advantages. Power supply dies? I can order a new one in literally seconds. And meanwhile I wait for it to arrive I can use a spare notebook charger or whatever. Etc.
The shortage sucked, but it is solved now.
Last image I created I tucked in a Raspberry Pi 1, and it worked just fine. The versatility is unmatched. Equally I can test an image at my home and then let someone install it on the other side of the globe.
The point of a Pi for me is more that you can have it where you need it. Attached to your TV or whatever.
For a home server I would recommend something beefier, an old desktop will be superior to any mini-pc and the Pi. But probably bulkier and more power hungry.
A Pi5 with nvme does work and be a decent home server for tinkering though. From my perspective the niche for the mini-PC is pretty much nonexistent.
But I don't think maximum utility is the goal though, it is a hobby. Do what you enjoy! Tinkering with low power PCs might be enough of a reason alone.
But these comparisons to the Pi doesn't make much sense to me.
For the RPi 5, for fully reliable operation, you need an oddball 5V/5A power supply, which is not actually a standard device. IMO Raspberry Pi messed this one up. At the price point, either use a barrel jack or support USB-PD for real. (The latter would be great for many use cases, because the same conversion circuitry would enable driving from a wide voltage range. A tiny cheap ESP board can do this — why not a rather pricey Raspberry Pi?)
I agree it isn't ideal, but you shouldn't blindly buy a PSU to any computer. Extra easy mistake to make when it is USB-C though.
edit: PPS is not supported. See:
It is weird that Pi5 doesn't do USB-PD 27W supply which is common. It would require converter from 9V. But that would cost money.
Make up your mind.
Or you don't need to bother with RPi PSUs or you shouldn't blindly buy a PSU to any computer.
It's even more ridiculous what you were proven wrong in your assumptions about RPi PSU.
But even if that was the case you shouldn't blindly buy one where the specs match.
Is it good quality, is it made for 24/7 operation, does it get hot etc.
In the Pi case it is quite simple. The official one isn't expensive and it is ubiquitous. It runs fine on most supplies though if you need one in a pinch. But I do recommend going for the official one for long term use.
It's a standard 19V laptop power supply. Any laptop supply will work with that HP device and they're just as easy to find as any other power supply.
The worst part of a Pi is the SD card. It's truly the worst interface to use for booting off. Extremely unreliable and due to kernel bugs, having your system on an SD card is extremely unstable. (but that is more of a Linux issue than an Pi issue).
For dabbling with electronics Pico or STM32 seem more reasonable. RPi GPIO is too limited for anything that could use its processing power. Not sure if there are even any distributions that would support realtime operations with those pins or things like DMA, custom protocols working at 1x-1xx MHz speeds.
I personally disliked dealing with federal agencies, but entities as local as a school district can easily have a palette of relatively new machines, sans hard drive, and are far more flexible in payment and how you choose to get it to you. For a brief period I used to rent a truck and do weekly runs from Brooklyn mostly to Maryland and Virginia and Pennsylvania and get back to my one bedroom with 90-120 computers. At the palette level prices can get down to the $10-$20 each machine level (probably higher now due to inflation), hard drives aren't really that expensive either. The biggest headache was shipping but the process is likely far more streamlined today. Of course, it probably would've been even cheaper if I didn't operate out of a tiny 1 BR in Brooklyn and can actually own a vehicle and have reliable parking It's not exactly my tax dollars at work, but effectively it is a sort of subsidized sale at the taxpayer's expense, Intel isn't really selling anything for pennies on the dollar, but pretty much every municipality and county government will, at least at some point.
They're fantastic as a low cost machine with decent specs that take up minimal room, they're also usually corporate devices in which there are plenty of drivers that work well out of the box.
I bought one to act as a home server and it works flawlessly running Proxmox, over the machine I built many years back which was slower and bigger.
I just think comparing the Raspberry Pi to these Mini-PC's is just a silly comparison to begin with.
For most self-hosting purposes mini-PC's are often the best option in my opinion, because they're small enough in size and low in power consumption to be comparable to raspi, but powerful enough for stuff like running a virtualization environment, and support containers that are only for x86. Admittedly I did go for desktop though, because I wanted more storage, dedicated GPU and ECC RAM, but for lots of people a single mini-PC could host everything.
I still like raspberry pi for doing small things where I want redundancy, like running DNS server that stays up even when I do maintenance on my main server. And obviously it's great for embedded projects and such.
In the end most of the gains made from the small footprint are lost because the actual physical footprint increase from the number of cables you have to attach to it from all sides.
Suprise - you are not the ones who do.
> Using an old second hand power supply is enough to turn me away.
> And the PI has many advantages. Power supply dies? I can order a new one in literally seconds'.
This is a quite a stupid argument.
a) it's totally the same for any other PC: you just order another 'in literally seconds'
b) if you don't like a second hand PSU then order a new one in the first place
> And meanwhile I wait for it to arrive I can use a spare notebook charger or whatever
... just like you can have a compatible charger for a mini-PC ?[0]
> For a home server I would recommend something beefier, an old desktop will be superior to any mini-pc and the Pi
For most of the people there is no need in 'beefier', 32Gb RAM, 256-1024Gb SATA/NVMe is all they need.
> The point of a Pi for me is more that you can have it where you need it. Attached to your TV or whatever.
Anyone can have mini-PC where they need it. It's because they are mini, not a desktop ones.
[0] by the way, most of the time those mini-PCs have a notebook style external PSUs (not some anemic square brick of 15W) and they are quite rare to break
On the contrary, the notebook style external PSUs are more likely to break and much harder to find replacements to. When it has happened to me the best source to buy has been to order it from another country.
I bought a tiny Lenovo i5-6500 system on eBay, and while it’s fantastic from a price/performance perspective, you can still hear a subtle whine when the ambient noise drops.
Which makes total sense - the acoustic output is probably not a major consideration when they’re optimizing for footprint and cost.
This. I basically made nearly the same comment somewhere else in this thread. But then we have similar nicknames so...
Otherwise they're a nice piece of kit. Perhaps someone can hack the BIOS to remove the fan protections.
I actually solved the problem by just discretely routing an Ethernet cable to a closet - but considering that it averages 10W from the wall, I definitely suspect I could get away with taking the lid off and adding a larger heat sink.
The performance gain is huge if done correctly. There is no need for these mitigations on homelabs.
One advantage the EliteDesk do have is that they are not ARM, which can help at times when I need to run that's only shipped as an image and that wasn't compiled for ARM. I know there are other ways but, well, when that happens I just run that on the EliteDesk.
Now the very obvious advantage the Raspberry Pi have: no fans. That is, to me, a big one. A huge one. My main PC is so quiet that I do hear the EliteDesk's fans when I turn one on. Typically I'll just run a Plex server at home on the EliteDesk and only turn it on when I want to stream something: the rest of the time they're off.
The Pi do run servers not requiring lots of CPU: like an unbound DNS server.
I don't see these as mutually exclusive: they can be complementary.
If I had to pick only one I'd probably still pick a Pi though.
Pi's are great for their ecosystem, being fanless, and cost for a brand new device.
Aside: ESP32/ESP8266 have taken over a lot of the hobbyist realm for connectivity + GPIO. $3 dev boards that are plenty fast for almost any single use-case scenario.
I gave up on Pis when I could not longer get them easily in my part of the world. And I agree with you, ESP32 boards are perfect for simple GPIO+Wifi connectivity.
> The Pi 5 can be fitted with an NVME SSD, but for me it's too little, too late. Because I feel there is a type of computer on the market, that is much more compelling than the Pi.
My pi4 has been running from an ssd for years now, no sd card. Usb3,not nvme but still good enough for my (most ?) use case.
Interesting. What likwly application of yours has 8 PIs in one case?
> My pi4 has been running from an ssd for years now
Not with 7 more in that case, right? :)
> Interesting. What likwly application of yours has 8 PIs in one case?
None at the moment, it's just to compare and put emphasis on how the case takes up too much space compared to a single pi.
> > My pi4 has been running from an ssd for years now
> Not with 7 more in that case, right? :)
Comment was more about how the pi4 could already boot and be run from an SSD (or NVME disk or whatever you put in a USB disk case).
I think, with some good cable management, we could put 5 pis and SSDs into the case though !
> I think, with some good cable management, we could put 5 pis and SSDs into the case though !
I eagerly await the HN post! :)
* Simple to install a well supported OS with a full UI. * GPIO array (including pwm, i2c, etc)
I could take one. Connect a keyboard and monitor. Jumper a few pins into a breadboard with an LED matrix, and right a python script to bitbang a multiplexed LED array
The only other product I have seen that I view as even competing in the same space is the OrangePi line. However, those are vastly inferior in terms of support.
If all you want is the GPIO array, there are thousands of other boards you could buy.
If all you want is a well supported, easy to use computer, there are hundreds of options to choice from.
If you want both in a single product, your options are very limited.
It depends on your needs. I find it perfectly capable when I need more than an STM32/ESP, but less than a PC, which is about 90% of the gadgetry I find enjoyable.
I don't understand all the anger. If you need a different platform, you need a different platform. /shrugs/
It wouldn't surprise me if paid influencers were fanning the flames, either; certain folks have a lot to lose if arm goes mainstream on the desktop.
And then there's the recent Raspberry P-IPO or whatever it was, which seems to have pissed a bunch of people off...
The timing is interesting.
I can see the appeal of the N100 and similar -- and am currently considering one -- but it's hard to beat the ~1W DNS/DHCP/Consul servers that have been humming away in this house trouble free for the last decade...
I don't need those to power my homelab. There's a reason they're separate, and tiny low-power Pi's are ideal for that job.
I have in my possession more than merely a hammer. :)
The entire point of the article is that at least the non-micro RPis are not "low-power" at all (something that agrees with my observations). The article is quoting around 3.5W for the RPi5. I was also getting a similar reading for my older RPi4 after months of fine-tuning, while _out of the box_ an N4000 miniPC had 1.8W consumption at idle. RPi may be cheap, but not much else.
No sense in running anything more powerful than that. Having the latest and greatest -- and top-tier performance -- isn't always necessary.
And I still consider to be a credit card sized server to be tiny. Though watch-sized machines do take the cake there...
Then again, N100 can also be bought with passive cooling. But not so sure how the mini PCs of the article would fare without a fan.
You can also expect your hardware to have a shorter life.
mini PC:
[X] No fans available with atoms or i3s
[X] No moving parts
[X] x86... Huge amount of software
[X] documentation
The only thing is support but the raspberry foundation is also not really helpful if you go into the nitty gritty parts.
I've got one of those, and it houses a system with 8 CPU cores, 32 GB RAM (can be upgraded to 64 if need be), 1 TB NVMe and 4 TB SSD - and it's all inside, whereas with an RPi the SSD would have to be external. The only thing that's collecting dust now is the old RPi.
If you're just using it like a normal computer, then it's not special.
The fact that you can run a Linux on it means you can tap into a big ecosystem of existing software. Nice to have.
the rpi does have a ton of software compared to other SBCs, but the article is about fking x86 machines.
With power consumption so low on some of these, I feel like they defeat most of the benefit of ARM and you get way more native software on x86
It provides a WebRTC stream for a USB camera (or Pi Camera, what I'm using). Rather than the old, inefficient, low-quality MJPEG stream. The software itself will run on anything, but the WebRTC only works on a Pi for now.
I have concerns.
One of the mini PCs tested in the article has a CPU with a 65W TDP! That's considerably more than the Pi 5 will draw (the entire SBC's power supply only has a capacity of 25W).
Also €100-150 for those used 1L boxes sounds a bit pricey to me, since in that range you can buy brand new minipcs that perform similarly (personally for a network-centric device probably I'd go on aliexpress and grab one of the fanless N100 router-style pcs).
I had a Pi1 running Stylus for home monitoring with maybe 10% CPU use at any time.
No need for a tiniminimicro to host a static blog site :-)
I have a micro Dell PC, and it runs like a champ. I'd take it over the Pi anyday for my uses.
It wouldnt touch a data centre but the simple ability to run CUDA (Rapids.ai for example) would mean you could prototype things pretty efficiently all on a local setup and not have to pay for GPU costs.
My 5 node Rpi5 Cluster ran $1500 with NVMe Hats and a PoE hat and cant do any GPU work :(
The proper comparison would be either be pi vs new mini PC (e.g. n100 based) or new mini PC vs used mini PC.
The N100 was roughly $50 more than the Pi 5 (after adding storage to the Pi). The idle cost to power both is roughly $5/year for the Pi5 and $10/year for an N100 (based on local electricity rates YMMV).
I'd argue the Pi still has a purpose: Running it off of battery/solar is likely better, it is physically smaller, and it also has pin-outs and documentation/software to support it. If all you're after though is a small-low power usage computer, it may not be the first choice anymore.
RPi5 is a great platform for prototyping, and many hobbyist applications, even if you move to ESP32 or similar afterwards, or if you decide that PC-ish platforms work better for you after all.
"One size fits all" has never worked in computing history and most likely never will...
I use one as a server, and another as a media center PC. My server has been going without issue for 5+ years now (granted, I'm not stressing it, its just for serving files and doing downloads).
The PI is about making hardware hacking accessible on a linux-based platform.
A refurb PC fails horribly at that.
EDIT: added STM.
I have also used a different Pi Zero W with an SDR dingle to decode APRS weather data, while also using GPIO to read a local DS18B20 temperature sensor and to switch a solid-state relay.
I could have done this last thing with any random Linux-ey PC plus an Arduino, but then I'd have two problems. (It would have also cost me rather substantially more money: I bought these Zero Ws very, very cheaply from Microcenter.)
Not mine, just something I found. I had a feeling one could run a GPS backed NTP server on a microcontroller without too much difficulty.
I have a Pi4 hooked up to a motion detector, a camera, a solenoid and some SCRs for a floodlight. A python script waits for an event interrupt from the motion detector on a GPIO. Then it turns on the lights and opens a door via GPIO, and starts recording in another thread (via a pipe to gstreamer). When the motion times out, it pushes the video to an private S3 bucket (using my own handshake for a token so that it can't be spammed).
(I used to have some GPIOs connected to motorized cat toys so that I could trigger them remotely while watching an realtime stream, but that throttled the above camera which was more important.)
... It is also a BLE gateway that monitors 4 temperature sensors, and also pushes that data up to the cloud with another python script.
... and it also is an MQTT gateway for a few NXP WiFi devices scattered around the yard, and their data ... you guessed it... is pushed up to the cloud (they control sprinklers because BLE doesn't have the range). I can log into my personal website and turn sprinklers on from anywhere my phone works.
Sure I could do the WiFi and BLE with a PC, but why waste the energy and space when I can use a tiny Pi that is already doing a bunch of other things?
I just keep adding things to it because I have my own cloud system (HomeAssistant is a big fat bloated joke).
Having a good BLE sensitivity and WiFi chip on a tiny linux board that runs dozens of python processes listening to GPIOs, and running Gstreamer would be too much of a hassle with a PC and far beyond an arduino.
Because where will you buy the replacement once RPI plc has discontinued it? Esp. considering the likes of https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1973...
Get a new replacement one, swap over the NVME. Doesn’t have to be the same cpu, linux handles the rest.
Relatedly- I find that old hardware is still very capable but ruined by new media codecs that lack HW acceleration. Are the new codecs really worth it when they essentially render whole generations obsolete for media?
I think you just put your finger on why they are so popular. Enshittification will prevail.
I also have recently gotten an N100 mini-PC, which helped me put one of my ancient mini-ITX i7 machines out to pasture. Those are amazing (and are dipping under $120 with 12GB RAM and 512GB SATA SSDs).
But more to the point, I think the space the original Pi occupied in hobbyist land is being eaten up by RP2040 and ESP32 MCUs, which can do everything I need I/O wise and with increasingly sophisticated software support (MicroPython is amazing for prototyping, and I even got a WaveShare RP2040 board to test that is a direct drop-in replacement for a Pi Zero)
I love the Pi and the flexibility and community it has. The only thing I’ve seen to rival it is the Arduino. But for casual needs like home theater or home assistant, these 2nd hand micro-PCs are excellent.
Quick aside, I actually got the micro-PC for a Starship bridge sim setup. I never put that together, but it is also a great use of these.
I've also given in to the temptation to use them as little servers on my LAN for various sorts of things. I've even tried to use them for HTPC boxes and they have worked ok.
However I have sent all my Pi's back to projects where I just want Linux plus GPIO. For everything else I replaced them with cheap mini PCs.
1) a bare Pi on a workbench/desk is fine but when connected to a TV in the living room has a very low WAF.
2) the arrangement of ports on a Pi are a complete pain in the ass. Even with a case any installation of a Pi looks like a careless hack job.
3) MicroUSB is complete fucking garbage. The port/connector wears or breaks and the slightest bump powers off the Pi. MicroUSB power supplies are usually also garbage and typically have criminally short cables. "Appliance" appropriate power for a Pi costs more than the Pi itself. USB-C in the 4B is better but I've only got one of those.
4) like power supplies a decent microSD card that won't randomly fail in a Pi ends up costing as much as a Pi.
I replaced a bunch of individual Pis running servers with a single mini PC with an N95. The Pis weren't taxed with the server loads so the N95 doesn't break a sweat. It's also way easier to manage since the various server apps are managed by a docker compose file.
The mini PCs replacing the HTPC Pis are just a better experience overall. The ports are all on one side, they have same barrel connectors for power, and their local storage doesn't magically corrupt itself because the unknowingly cheap power supply didn't provide enough power.
I still love the Pis for small nerd projects but just don't want to deal with them anymore for pretty much anything else. If you don't need GPIO for a project and physical volume isn't a prime concern a <$100 mini PC is a far more convenient option today than a Pi. That wasn't true ten years ago which was why I started using Pis for servers and stuff but today it is definitely the case.
2) USB is grouped together and HDMI is on the side. I guess you could have all ports on one side or on opposite sides but that seems like a non-issue.
3) Pi5 is usb c and does its job. The optional 15V kerfuffle is a bit annoying, yes.
4) Why would you want to use a microSD card instead of just using a usb stick?
> If you don't need GPIO for a project and physical volume isn't a prime concern a <$100 mini PC is a far more convenient option today
Agreed, though then going up further up in volume to itx or matx might be even more convenient.
Hyper V Server runs any Linux VM via VHD or ISO installation image. You can provision using Vagrant to automate your setup.
It was nice to consolidate all of my resources, clean up the spider web of raspberry pi’s, and reduce VM costs by running everything locally .
Now that I have a separate server, I find it easier to develop the VMs on my dev machine, snapshot and then migrate them to the server. I have a library of base images for alpine, Debian & Kali Linux that I can launch as easily as AWS.
Using Hyper-V across both makes this seamless. I can manage the servers using the Windows Management Instrumentation (gui) or RDP into the server.
I know many Linux users have aversion to Windows, but I get a lot of benefit out of Windows for other applications as well (gaming, one drive, document indexing, copilot, as well as all the great native apps)
Right now I can buy:
Raspberry Pi 5, 2.4GHz Quad-core CPU, 8GB for £76.80
Raspberry Pi 4, 1.5GHz Quad-core CPU, 1GB RAM, for £33.60
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, 1GHz Quad-core CPU, 512MB RAM, for £14.40
(None of those prices include SD card, PSU, case, or any peripherals)
Is that a price rise, or just the high end getting higher?
There are better SBC's out there, but raspberry pi is familiar.
I really hope the recent IPO doesn't change too much...
The cheapest HP desktop in Germany costs more than 500€: https://www.hp.com/de-de/shop/list.aspx?fc_form_mini=1&fc_fo...
Perhaps have the cron reboot disable service for a couple of hours?
People I know that wanted to play with single board computers, they bought raspberry pi. The market is saturated, and PIs do not break that often if you do not use pins.
It will take time for any other SBC to replace it, or even to come close.
That 6W more costs around $5.26 per year at $0.10/kWh, which is basically nothing.
people that use the raspberry pi to host their things should definitely use these mini computers.
i believe there are other great alternatives out there that's just as affordable (cheaper than a Pi), just as powerful as a mini pc, and has an extensive IO support for prototyping.
Briefly, the Pi absolutely sucked in a bunch of ways compared to the MeLE Quieter 3Q that replaced it.
1. Pi couldn't use USB 7.1 audio device in the mode I needed (7.1 out + line in). No idea why, but Linux totally froze up when I selected that mode, and remained frozen until I physically unplugged the usb device. On the same USB device this worked fine on other computers. This meant that I couldn't use my external Bluetooth receiver seamlessly via the Pi.
2. YouTube failed in a bunch of ways. Seriously! Neither Chrome nor Firefox would work 100% reliably. Sound issues on most videos, awful performance, locking up the browser.
https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=323640&start=...
https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=151632
3. Can't be put to sleep or remotely started using Wake On LAN
4. Lacking sufficient hardware encoders/decoders
5. Everything goes through the USB bus, so you get awful storage/network performance
6. Can't use Wine to run windows apps. While this may not be an issue for many people it was for me because I wanted to use MusicBee. Wine works fine on the Pi if you've got ARM compatible windows apps. So good luck with that.
7. The hassle and cost of getting a decent case.
I ended up spending a few hundred bucks on the MeLe and everything just worked. Flawlessly. First time. And I had a wide-open choice of Linux distributions.
However I have one or two projects that I keep kicking down the road due to time constraints which involves a rasprerry pi zero w2. The reason being is that it's compact, packs a decent punch and is extremely easy to power it from an 18650 battery and keep a low profile.
I'm fine with the current prices of the raspberry pis but it's hard to justify using one of them if you don't need GPIO pins or something that uses little power. My advice to the raspberry pi foundation is to stop trying to push performance and focus on features. I'd be the first in line to get a new raspberry if it comes with a battery hat and LoRa built in(the project I was referring to really). Here's another one(which ironically already sort of exists): the milkv duo. There are lots of cases when you don't need a full operating system 24/7, which would waste a lot of resources to do one-off tasks every now and then. Ideally you should be able to boot the OS from a sensor or some sort of signal, which is hooked to a very under-powered micro-controller only when you really need it, let it do it's job and then power it off. As we stand, the raspberry pi foundation largely offers the same product in different form factors with some arguably marginal upgrades, which most people don't really need.
It runs home assistant and bunch of other docker images.
It has a DVBT-2 hat that feeds tvheadend that lets me watch broadcast TV on my laptop and phone.
It doesnt make a noise. It doesnt reboot randomly. It doesnt get hot. It doesnt get hacked.
After that, who cares?
compare it to an intel n100 machine. https://www.amazon.co.uk/TRIGKEY-Lake-N100-Processor-G4-Comp... £165 16 gigs of ram, 500gig ssd.
1957 single core passmark and 5548 multicore. More importantly its 5 watts at full CPU
You can run it off 19v DC, and its physically tiny. Yes, it has a fan, but its not that loud, significantly quieter than the HP
The second hand HP is just not compelling anymore, unless you need more than one drive, or you need something physically larger.
TLDR: the PI isn't great for KVM. The n100 is.
I have a mix of n100s, NUCs and Pis. Each has their purpose. If you really want cheap ephemeral linux, then the pi-zero is still dirt cheap. £20 for a linux machine with wifi.