Hacker News Reader

Comment by quaintdev | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question what is the use case for such configuration I mean less RAM and powerful CPU?

I use my Pi for self hosting so I need more memory and more CPU is always better for my case. If they need less power consumption then they could have used Pi 4 or other lower version.

Besides low cost I don't see other advantage of such configuration. Please enlighten me.

View on HN

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.

Why do you need the horsepower of a Pi 5 to run Octoprint? There probably won't be a notable slicing speed difference compared to a Pi 4 and that was reasonably fast already.

I don’t really, but the significant reduction in boot time and longer expected useful service life was worth the small cost increase. I’m actually getting something for my money that will benefit me every time I reboot.

Fair enough, the Pi 5 boot/shutdown speed is pretty shockingly instant. I'm not sure why the Pi 4 takes literal minutes to reboot sometimes.

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.

Given people typically use these for a home server or embedded controller, who cares about saving a couple watts?

1 watt savings idle? .72 kwh a month? in my area that's about 5₵ , even in california that's 40₵ / month / device ?

Are 1000-instance Pi arrays common? i can think of 100 better ways to get that amount of computing resources.

I think you are applying your usecase and thinking that is everyone's use case. Think battery power.

Yup. I had students running a machine learning model on a Pi attached to a scooter. The power draw of the computing system was significant, and the performance limitations were too.

The existence of commodity, well-documented, well-supported SBCs offering more computing in less power is exciting.

(Also, using less power means you can put it in more places without worrying about getting rid of the heat, or can go longer before throttling).

would 1 watt have mattered?

20-30% more battery life and having more performance would have simplified our life, yes.

how much of the current for the application was drawn by the pi? if it's a scooter, you are pulling 100amps for the scooter and 200ma for the pi

The computer was on its own battery to get clean power. And it was using more than 200mA "power", not that mA is a unit of power.

Honestly, it feels like you're trying to prove me wrong about my one case. Power consumption and heat dissipation matter. The pi is rarely the lowest power path one could use to do computing, and it isn't the highest performance, either... but using less power and having more performance makes it suitable for more things (obviously).

as in portable or embedded? Embedded, Pi has too much consumption. saving a watt isn't your problem

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com