What is this even supposed to mean? What's "the Pentium 4 route"?

I'm an old fart :)

Intel tried to scale frequency up with the Pentium 4 in the name of performance, and it ended up extremely hot and power hungry. Just like some high end CPUs now, but then it applied to every model from Intel.

I suppose you don't remember when a Raspberry Pi could run fine even without a heatsink, let alone active cooling. That's more recent than the Pentium 4.

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esskay 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's already there really. It's heat output on the 4 and more so the 5 benefits from active cooling. The good news is the pi is practically pointless as a product for most people these days, and vastly better options are available cheaper, so unless you genuinely need the gpio theres little reason to buy one - very much their own fault for focusing on commercial applications but the Pi 5 as a product is practically pointless for a consumer use at this point. An old Pi 2 or 3 which dont need any cooling are very useful still for a range of applications but the newer ones are in a bit of a weird niche where they're overpriced compared to most options.

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sceptic123 12 hours ago | parent [-]

What are the cheaper options for e.g. running a media centre?

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nottorp 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Probably second hand intel/amd boxes.

	▲	esskay 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		yup bingo, you can pick up vastly better devices than a pi for quite literally half the price now.

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sgarland 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks for giving me yet another reminder that I’m old. I caught the reference immediately and thought nothing of it, and then this shattered that.

The early ‘00s were a wild time. Intel boldly stating they expected to get the P4 up to 10 GHz, AMD having to assign clock speed equivalence ratings for their chips… I also remember thinking the P4EE was insanely priced ($1000, or about $1700 in 2025 USD), but now we have >$10K Threadrippers.