More like people try doing anything other than use the base OS, and realize the bottom-tier x86 mini-PCs are 3-4x faster for the same price, and can encode a basic video stream without bogging down.

If the RPI came with any recent mid-tier Snapdragon SOC, it might be interesting. Or if someone made a Linux distro that supports all devices on one of the Snapdragon X Elite laptops, that would be interesting.

Instead, it's more like the equivalent of a cheap desktop with integrated GPU from 20 years ago, on a single board, with decent linux support, and GPIO. So it's either a linux learning toy, or an integrated component within another product, and not much in between.

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adrian_b 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Qualcomm has rebranded a Snapdragon with quadruple Cortex-A78 cores (and 4 small Cortex-A55), from the expensive smartphones of 2021, as "Dragonwing" QCM6490 and they now sell it for embedded devices.

There are at least 3 or 4 SBCs with it, in RPI sizes and prices.

Cortex-A78 is much faster than the Cortex-A76 from RK3588 or the latest RPI (e.g. at least 50% faster at the same clock frequency), and its speed at the same clock frequency does not differ much from that of recent medium-size cores like Cortex-A720 or Cortex-A725.

Cortex-A78 is the stage when Arm stopped making significant micro-architectural changes in medium-sized cores. The later improvements were in the bigger Cortex-X cores. The main disadvantage of the older Cortex-A78 is that it does not implement the SVE instruction set of the Armv9-A ISA.

While mini-PCs with Intel/AMD CPUs are usually preferable, for an ARM SBC I would no longer buy any model that has older cores than Cortex-A78.

Besides the Qualcomm Dragonwing based SBCs, there are also Cortex-A78 based SBCs with Mediatek or NVIDIA CPUs, but those are more expensive.

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overfeed 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> So it's either a linux learning toy, or an integrated component within another product, and not much in between.

Raspberry Pi are excellent at being general-purpose, full-Linux boxes that consume very low power (some can idle at <1W). Perfect for ambient computing, cron-jobs, MQTT-related hackery, VPN gateways, ad-blocking DNS servers, or anything else that isn't CPU-bound, but benefits from being always available[1].

1. In my case, this ironically includes orchestrating higher-wattage computers via Wake-on-Lan and powering them down when not needed

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charcircuit 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Bottom tier computers were more than $25.

	▲	ssl-3 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		They still are. They always have been. Since the introduction of the OG Raspberry Pi, 14 years ago, there's been an ongoing cognitive problem wherein people look at the price of a brand new, never used SBC that can purchased from a reliable retail company. Then they also look at the price of a used corpo PC (that is bigger, and noisier) that some rando in Iowa is selling on eBay. And then they boldly compare the prices of the two things as if these details just don't exist. But the details do exist. The details show that the two things are not the same. They can never be the same. One is a shiny fresh apple that is free of blemishes, and the other is a bruised old grapefruit that someone has already started eating. They're both fruit, but they're very different things.

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colechristensen 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's tiny and low power, I run CI on a Pi5 and do a few other things and experiments on them.