New 2GB Raspberry Pi 5 has 33% smaller die, 30% idle power savings

Sure, if you need a machine to do "normal" PC/server things, buying a computer would be the natural path.

There's also the Radxa X4 — Pi 4/5 form factor (tiny bit larger but not substantial), has a PoE HAT available, has 40-pin GPIO (with caveats, but it's basically a Pico strapped on the same board), and the N100's built-in GPU can run circles around the Pi or even RK3588 boards.

The efficiency isn't there, and you'll need to figure out a better cooling/case solution than the one Radxa ships, but I'm impressed by this little board.

If you can stretch your budget past $100 you can get a good brand new N100 or N305 system that will go further. Used gear is fine, but the power efficiency for anything in the $50-80 range used is pretty rough. Some people don't worry much about that, but in some parts of the world it can be $5+/month more to run older machines!

A few notes (as someone who is pretty staunchly anti-Pi-as-a-server, I end up having this debate often, and I do think there are reasons to do both):

* A Pi will sit much lower in total power consumption than almost any used PCs if both are doing effectively nothing (ie - simple, spiky tasks like filtering DNS, serving static content from RAM, etc.). You need to be doing something with the system before a PC server comes out ahead, and most people using a Pi as a home server... aren't.

Compared to a modern low-power x86 PC system, the difference isn't meaningful, but if you're buying used stuff 3 generations back, the difference becomes somewhat meaningful in terms of electric cost (on the order of tens of dollars per year, which is significant for hardware which cost tens of dollars to start with).

* The Pi of course has GPIO, SPI, etc. exposed, so you can use it as a nice "hybrid-IoT" device where it's a home server _and_ a sensor aggregator, for example. And the hat ecosystem, while generally insanely overpriced, is convenient.

Now, the moment you're running K8s/Docker or a real compute workload (security camera image recognition, etc.) you should probably move off of the Pi and onto something nicer, indeed. I absolutely never understood people running clusters of Pis or those goofy multi-Pi carrier boards. Just buy a real PC.

Emphasis on way more power. Granted, power draw isn't a huge problem for price reasons, since the cost of electricity is usually not that huge of a factor, but if you wind up running a lot of these, it can add up. More power draw is also a detriment if you want to keep things lean for longer battery, which makes me hesitant to put many older stock computers in the critical path of my network.

Don't get me wrong, though. Old stock computers are excellent for a wide variety of tasks, it's just that they definitely don't encroach on a lot of the use cases of modern SBCs. You needn't buy a Raspberry Pi 5 either; plenty of use cases like Home Assistant will run pretty well on a Pi 4 or even a Pi 3, and that's not getting into the many other reasons why a Pi may be interesting (like HATs, being able to use PoE power, GPIO, or even just the I/O in general.)

I can't bring myself to buy Lenovo anything since they've repeatedly shipped products infested with malware, sometimes doing it in exchange for money. Once a company sinks that low and treats users with such disrespect I don't know how or why they should be trusted again.

I just bought one! It's brilliant, I had no idea. Cost almost nothing, and I removed the HDD and put an SSD in there, extra RAM and it's lightning quick.

Right now I have Windows 10 on it as I needed to run some old proprietary software, but it's a proper gem of a machine. I got the one without touch screen.

Have 13 of them and I love them

What's the break even point for the way more power vs the cheaper upfront cost? My raspberry pi has probably saved hundreds of dollars over the years in electricity vs what I'd have spent running a cheap Intel box

A small amount.

> As a rule of thumb, you can expect to allocate around 3 watts of power for every 8GB of DDR3 or DDR4 memory.

Their numbers seem to indicate that Pi disabled parts of the chip in firmware instead of physically lasering them out. This leaves those parts still leaking some current and explains the power difference.

> 8 vs 16GB RAM, would that make a measurable power difference?

I think the short answer is.. it depends. Current draw depends on usage, supposedly from 10% at idle up to full when doing massive read/writes. But it should be in the two to three digit miliwatt range which isn't much compared to the N100 itself which pulls 6W at idle, being an inefficient x86 space heater.

The Pi 4 4GB can idle at 1W using LPDDR4, the Pi 5 8GB using 50% more efficient LPDDR4x idles at... 3W. Meanwhile the average 12GB LPDDR5X Android phone can idle a whole week on a tiny 1 cell lipo (with power saving mode on), making this look so bad it's actually funny.

The long standing problem with Pi Foundation products is a complete disregard for any low power states, sleep or hibernation, so they probably don't do any RAM related power optimization either. It's only now with the RP2350 that they've finally implemented some kind of working sleep mode for the very first time in anything at all.

Pi 5's peak consumption is higher, but if you are doing the same amount of computational work (but a bit above idle) it is less.

Now this uses even less, and even the idle powers are comparable to 4. This wins in every way over Pi4, except cost.

If your needs are greater than a Pi but not at the level where you want to be buying professional server hardware, I can recommend checking if you or a family member still has a laptop they're not using anymore. Free hardware that would otherwise end up going to waste, and anything that had good performance in 2012 is still faster than a new Pi today. The older, the more likely it is to have replaceable RAM so you can stick in 16GB easily (older RAM types are also cheaper)

Maybe real time image processing from a camera. 2GB would probably be more than enough, and less power draw is nice when running continuously.

For an embedded application involving signage or a kiosk, 2GB is probably plenty, and if you're doing enough of them the money saved would be worth it.

For a home user with one, or only a handful of, machines I don't think you'd necessarily need to save a few bucks this way. Although people obsessing over pennies is a theme in most Raspberry Pi threads, so there is clearly appeal for some.

I don't know if this configuration works for me, but unlike a lot of people here I have used Raspberry Pi's in robots. The 5's power consumption is such that it is a problem. The jensen nano is no longer supported. So maybe there is a "thingaverse" need for something more powerful then a pico /arduino but not so power hungry.

Broadcom pushed the old Raspberry Pi SoC architecture as far as it would go, but it's hard limited to 1Gb RAM.

Raspberry Pi has become a development platform for Broadcom SoC, so they can sell the same chip in their corporate products and the cost of development is partially covered by Pi sales.

They also have an educational non-profit organisation, but don't mistake the Raspberry Pi for a 100% selfless endeavour.

Broadcom have been very hostile at taking Pi clones of the market. Look at that happened to ODroid's Zero clone with the same SoC as the Zero.

I frequently don't even install a GUI on most of my Pi projects, and barely use the capability that the hardware offers for my embedded applications. Why would I want to pay more money for capability and capacity that I will not use? That is stupid, and wasteful, and inefficent, and against my personal engineering philosophy.

So, the use-case is being tight wadded, skinflinted miserly old bastard who would prefer to put his extra cash toward yet another dumb old guitar, than DRAM that will be DEADBEEF for it's entire life?

Currently I am waiting on Adafruit to deliver a 2gb Pi 5 to run Klipper and Octoprint for my 3D printer. Explain to me why paying more of my money for 8gb would have been a smarter choice, given the difference in price accounted for about 20% of the cost of my most recent neato pawnshop guitar find, and the hardware more than exceeds the minimum capability for my needs? Please enlighten me.

I don't see why there wouldn't be, it's cheaper to manufacture with seemingly no downsides. They probably won't revise the 4GB and 8GB versions until their stocks of the original stepping are used up though, and once they do introduce revised versions it may be a lottery which version you get for a while.

TSMC charged just a hair under $4000 per 16nm wafer in 2020.

Wafer calculators at 0.2 defect/cm2 on a 300mm wafer gives 950 fully-good dies out of 1061 for the old die (~89% good) and 1469 fully-good dies out of 1584 (~93%) for the new dies.

Dividing that out gives $4.21/chip for the old chip and $2.72/chip for the new chip. At $80 for an 8gb board, that represents a ~1.9% increase in profit per board. For the $60 4gb version, it's more like 2.5% increase in profit per board.

In real-world terms, if they sell 10M Pi5 units with the new chip, they'll have an extra $15M in the bank in saved production costs alone (minus whatever costs to strip everything out and tape out again). Furthermore, the new chip gets cheaper with every chip they make as the R&D costs get more and more diluted.

They've improved a lot, it's mostly the broadcom graphics firmware that still requires blobs. Probably because they've licensed the IP from somewhere else and the effort to reward ratio is too low.

I wouldn't mind them not using open firmware as much if we had unofficial alternatives that worked without sacrificing functionality, but I don't think anyone has managed that even after all this time.