I dunno when it happened but I swear SBCs were the new best thing in the universe for a while and everyone was building cool little servers with their RockPis and OrangePis.
Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox with everyone shitting on Arm. What happened? What gives?
Is my small army of xPis pointless? What about my 2 Edge routers?
I’ve got about 6 xPis scattered round my flat - is there anything worth doing with them or should I just bin them?
All thoughts, feelings and information welcome. Thank you.
This exactly. If you already have Pis they are still great. Back when they were $35 it was a pretty good value proposition with none of the power or space requirements of a full size x86 PC. But for $80-$100 it’s really only worth it if you actually need something small, or if you plan to actually use the gpio pins for a project.
If you’re just hosting software a several year old used desktop will outperform it significantly and cost about the same.
less so with TCO considering the power budget…laptops however…
The Pi 5 isn’t very power efficient. X86 CPU’s from a few years ago were already on a more efficient process node
You’re quite right about the Pi 5 power efficiency, an Alder Lake N100 / i3 will smoke it in ops / watt given the right board, but the context was ‘a several year old used desktop’ which the Pi will handily beat.
True. I did some rough math when I needed to right-size a UPS for my home server rack and estimated that running a Pi4 for a year would cost me about $8 worth of electricity and that running an x86 desktop would cost me about $40. Not insignificant for sure if you’re not going to use the extra performance that an x86 PC can offer.
And then there’s still all the crap it needs to work, if you don’t already have it. Power supply, adapters, storage, case, hats, etc.