Imagine clustering 7 desktops from 2006, same performance.

Hahaha. Yeah, but probably an order of magnitude less power consumption though.

I think the Pi4 would be closer to a 2006 desktop (Core 2 Duo). Pi3 is more like a 2002 or so Desktop, perhaps.

Oh, I didnt even realize it wasnt 4. 4 is on par with 2005 Athlon 64 X2, 3 will be ~half that, somewhere around 2003 Athlon 64.

> How is the performance output compared to a regular desktop

Sorry, but often budget (junk) CPUs are only 10% of the performance of current desktop-class processors.

You can use "openssl speed" to test and compare performance.

When I was experimenting with Intel's Atom netbook chip, it was exactly 10% of a Xeon thread. So it could be used for httpd static content, but not java.

> It'd be an interesting setup to test parallelism and learn how things work.

Long-term, they can be used for DNS, PXE, etc. but most people will not get their money back. If you plan to use docker or k8s, verify they have the right CPU options first.

https://www.openssl.org/docs/man1.1.1/man1/openssl-speed.htm...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Atom

Are you sure that it wasn't due to the fact that Intel Atom doesn't have AES instruction set[1]? I think openssl uses it a lot so it would explain this huge difference (since looking at the clocks, AVX/SSEs etc. I would expect at most ~50% difference looking at single core of Xeon vs single core of Atom) unless generations of Xeon and Atom were many years apart. I think newer RbPis CPUs have AES instructions so they could be faster than Atoms in applications that utilise it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set

Thanks man.. I know. I've an old Asus laptop/netbook with an Atom processor. Quad-core I might add. The travesty! It's slow as hell. I bought it because it had an 11 inch screen and I wanted something small. I bought it for AUD $300 back in 2015. I haven't used it more than a month. It's just part of my electronics junk collection. Now a days I'm a lot more careful before buying these things. That's why I've been holding on to the idea of buying a bunch of RPi 4s or Jetson Nanos. It's probably a better idea to get a proper GPU for my Ryzen desktop.

As a general concept, an old low-end laptop can sometimes be usefully repurposed as a low end NAS. It just needs a sufficient amount of ram (depends on the NAS software), and the ability to plug in disks via some means (USB, etc).

It wouldn't be fast, but the battery in it (unless completely dead) even provides some power-outage protection. :)