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Comment by dns_snek | Hacker News Reader

Who are these for? Raspberry Pi made sense as an educational and dirt cheap hobbyist platform when it sold for ~$30. At $120 + accessories it's just another expensive toy.

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We use them for all kinds of one off R&D projects at work. University students and researchers build all kinds of stuff with these. I know several companies who build low volume specialty industrial applications powered by RPi hardware. In all these cases the difference between $50 and $150 is meaningless

It's still a reasonably competent very small desktop computer, and the best supported small ARM machine you can find.

Yes but at this price it competes with machines with real nvme storage and upgradeable ram.

And it’s not even low power any more.

2W idle isn't low-power?

It requires active cooling doesn't it...

The Pi500, which is essentially the same hardware, works with passive cooling.

Active coolers exist to fit within the tiny footprint. If you have the space, you can go with passive cooling or a cooling case (essentially a large heatsink).

I've had good luck with entirely passive cooling for a pi5. It was 12 bucks for a the osb cnc aluminum version. https://www.digikey.com/en/blog/edatecs-two-fan-less-cnc-cas...

Pi 4, depending on the environment, also needed active cooling, in my experience. Especially in summer, with room temperature above 28*C, it couldn't handle any load until I added a fan. (The good thing about it was that I could control the fan with PWM easily - it was fun :))

But the Pi 3 didn't. You'd think with the process improvements they'll be able to have more performance in the same heat envelope, but they want to do their own Pentium IV...

Process improvements can only go that far - register banks, speculative execution, instruction reordering, many execution units and so on use power, but are needed because the processor can be faster, but the memory is still much slower.

I'd agree except the laptop i'm typing this on seems to use 4.5 W right now, the whole system :)

I don't expect Apple like power/performance ratio from everyone, but they could at least try...

No, it does not.

> the best supported small ARM machine you can find.

Wouldn't that be the new Mac mini?

It means running Linux or BSD comfortably on it.

This is true of M2 mac minis at least

No, this is https://www.nvidia.com/en-eu/project-digits/

I really want one of those machines, but I will be shocked if they are even "well supported," let alone "best supported."

They ship with linux. Macs have zero linux support from Apple

It costs $3000, and Nvidia is known to drop support for their developer platforms quickly.

Should have specified "for Linux".

You can find plenty of YouTube videos for that but I bet you rarely find anyone who actually uses it that way on a daily basis. The performance and desktop experience are just miserable.

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