Comment by demondemidi
17 days ago
It is odd to me that people call the RPi 3/4/5 "not capable."
It depends on your needs. I find it perfectly capable when I need more than an STM32/ESP, but less than a PC, which is about 90% of the gadgetry I find enjoyable.
I don't understand all the anger. If you need a different platform, you need a different platform. /shrugs/
I'm starting to wonder if we're seeing the ramping up of an Arm vs. Intel war at the same level as Mac vs. Windows, or emacs vs. vi, with Raspberry Pi as a convenient proxy, and all the usual foibles of every other us vs. them war.
It wouldn't surprise me if paid influencers were fanning the flames, either; certain folks have a lot to lose if arm goes mainstream on the desktop.
And then there's the recent Raspberry P-IPO or whatever it was, which seems to have pissed a bunch of people off...
The timing is interesting.
I can see the appeal of the N100 and similar -- and am currently considering one -- but it's hard to beat the ~1W DNS/DHCP/Consul servers that have been humming away in this house trouble free for the last decade...
I don't need those to power my homelab. There's a reason they're separate, and tiny low-power Pi's are ideal for that job.
I have in my possession more than merely a hammer. :)
Where are these tiny low-power RPis that idle at 1W ? Are you measuring at the wall (i.e. with the power adapter inefficiencies?)
The entire point of the article is that at least the non-micro RPis are not "low-power" at all (something that agrees with my observations). The article is quoting around 3.5W for the RPi5. I was also getting a similar reading for my older RPi4 after months of fine-tuning, while _out of the box_ an N4000 miniPC had 1.8W consumption at idle. RPi may be cheap, but not much else.
I'm not running 4's or 5's. I'm running 2's and 3's. And they're mostly idle; DNS, DHCP, and Consul are all extremely lightweight. No video, wifi, or anything else; just ethernet and an SD card.
No sense in running anything more powerful than that. Having the latest and greatest -- and top-tier performance -- isn't always necessary.
And I still consider to be a credit card sized server to be tiny. Though watch-sized machines do take the cake there...