| ▲ | phoronixrly 4 days ago |
| If they were cost competitive for ... anything at all really... |
|
| ▲ | jacobr1 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| They are competitive for hobbyist use cases. Limited home servers, or embedded applications that overlap with arduino. |
| |
| ▲ | kldg 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I picked up some 1GB Rock-2F boards while available in the US for ~$10/ea. Seems they aren't shipping the 1GB boards to the US anymore though. Before this, I had a couple Raspberry Pis; one I fried, and the other acted as a web server for a few years. My realization in ordering the Rock-2Fs is I really only need an MMU (that is, an SBC instead of something like an ESP32) when I'm running something with a graphical desktop, which is, outside my workstation, never (except for kiosks, which I use Android tablets for). -OR when I want to plug something into a bloated SBC board which saves me from having to solder a connector on, which is sometimes. I use one for running a timelapse camera (camera is USB) while another is a portable mp3 player I can put in shirt pocket and which has aux port (tho its aux line is noisy). -So that's two of the four Rock-2F boards in use.... but it took me far less time to think up uses and deploy 25/25 of seeedstudio's ESP32C3 boards I ordered a couple years ago, and have used ~5/25 of the ESP32C6s I ordered early this year. They're so cheap, and use so much less energy than ARM boards, that it's difficult to justify using the SBCs anymore. I think they're asking $50 for a base 2GB Pi4B, now -- that's 10 ESP32C3 boards (with integrated WiFi and BMS, btw!) -- and the Pi5 is even less competitive except in what I'd characterize as a very unusual scenario where you need high compute at edge (where it's both needed AND the latency of computing at the edge is lower than sending it to central server for processing), OR you need the security of protected memory, OR you have no central server and an ESP32 isn't going to cut it (I'll say, though, that one can run a thermostat with multiple WiFi-connected thermometers, and run a web server interface just fine.). |
|
|
| ▲ | wltr 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Well I have a Pi as a home server, and it’s very energy efficient, while doing what I want. Since I don’t need latest and greatest (I don’t see any difference with a modern PC for my use case), it’s very competitive for me. No need for any cooling is bonus. |
| |
| ▲ | Waraqa 3 days ago | parent [-] | | >very energy efficient If your server has a lot of idle time, ARM will always win. | | |
| ▲ | wltr 3 days ago | parent [-] | | My home server mostly not used. It triggers some simple bash scripts each hour, or each night. It serves some simple personal web pages. I access them a couple of times a day, each time randomly. I have a Raspberry Pi 1B, and it looks like despite being massively underpowered, it’s the most energy efficient. And in my use-case, I think of using it for the task. One day my primary Raspberry Pi broke (turned out to be a PSU issue), and I thought of having an old laptop running 24/7 as a home server. While being not very power hungry, it’s still wants much more energy (plus it has fans). For a casual usage (I forgot to mention Pi-Hole) it feels like an overkill. So, while a Raspberry Pi isn’t the best, it has its niche, and I’m happy of having one (actually, a few). |
|
|
|
| ▲ | ACCount37 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Prototyping and low volume. They're good for long as the development costs dominate the total costs. |
|
| ▲ | ssl-3 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It depends on the application. If one just wants a cheap desktop box to do desktop things with, then they're a terrible option, price-wise, compared to things like used corpo mini-PCs. But they're reasonably cost-competitive with other new (not used!) small computers that are tinkerer-friendly, and unlike many similar constructs there's a plethora of community-driven support for doing useful things with the unusual interfaces they expose. |
|
| ▲ | magicalhippo 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I picked up several Rpi 4 2GB for $20 each just before covid-19. At that price point they've been quite competitive for small homelab workloads. The current RPi 5 makes no sense to me in any configuration, given its pricing. |
| |
| ▲ | mayli 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, it's only competitive as a toy for under $35, anything beyond that you can get a cheap x86 with much better performance, a much compatible architecture and much more IOs. |
|
|
| ▲ | rebolek 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| They are cost competitive enough for Korg synthesizers which is pretty OK for me. |
