It can use as much as 15W under heavy load, but most of my Pi 4-based projects seem to idle around 3-5W.

> "...most of my Pi 4-based projects seem to idle around 3-5W."

Some current Intel NUC models can manage less than 5W idle power as well, e.g. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15571/intel-nuc10i7fnh-frost-... but don't have the limitations of the Pi.

Have newer versions of these things improved? Our company bought a new round of NUC7s and NUC5s and life span was pretty abysmal.

I still use a NUC5i3RYH every day. It has been remarkably stable, haven't had to replace a single part or have any issues since building it in 2015, and makes an outstanding Hackintosh to boot.

Either I got lucky with the two I own, or your environment was to harsh for them?

Hmm that's really really surprising if thats the case. According to the spec sheet [1], its TDP is 95W. RAM itself is 3W each, the cooling fans is easily 5W, the CPU cooling fan should be another 10W-20W. Would love to learn the configuration that gives you 20W power usage total. To put into perspective, my mac M1 uses 20Wish normally for regular usage.

[1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/52207/i...

I just got a "1 Liter Form Factor" HP DeskPro 405 G6 Mini that measures about 175x175x35mm (7x7x1.4 inches). AMD Ryzen 7 4750GE PRO (Zen 2) that has a base 3.1GHz clock for eight cores (4.3GHz all boost) which is an APU with eight Radeon GPU cores, in which I DIY added in 64GB of memory, and a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro.

With the Intel AX200 WiFi 6 and BT 5.0 disabled, it idles at barely 12W. Running a bunch of virtualized loads (nothing crazy) in XCP-NG, it's consistently under 20W despite no matter what's running on it. If I had it going flat out (with a 5GbE NIC plugged in via USB Type-C) under something like heavy video rendering (CPU+GPU+storage) loads it peaks at about 48-50W.

We're entering an era of pretty fantastic power consumption, especially if you shy further away from Intel SKUs at the moment. The Intel SKUs are pretty frugal, but the AMD ones genuinely sip power and are only getting better.

[1]

TDP is worst case sustained heat output for selecting heatsinks, not representative of typical consumption at all. Typical CPU fans are also like 12V/0.25A max with power variable between 50 to 100% or so. 20W idle is thus very believable for a build by a sane person[2].

1: https://www.gamersnexus.net/images/media/2017/CPUs/tr-1950x/...

2: Personally I often end up with more substantial configurations like 12V/1.5A 80mm with couple 12V/1A as sides but my suspicion is my lack of sanity is a huge contributor to that

I run ThrottleStop on windows with everything set to minimum, so the CPU is pretty much running locked to 800mhz - absolutely enough for a NAS.

> its TDP is 95W

So AMD and Intel measure TDP differently because obviously they do.

Intel's TDP is based on the max the CPU can generate while AMD is based on what an average user would encounter.

You've got it the wrong way around there. AMD is much more conservative.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/319402-intels-desktop-...

"It’s easy to see why Intel hasn’t changed the way it defines or communicates TDP to its customers: It would make the company’s high end look vastly worse compared with AMD. A Core i9-10850K will draw up to 265W. If you want an AMD CPU with that kind of power budget you have to buy a Threadripper."

Intel's TDP is more based on the max the CPU would draw, when all the various Turbo modes are disabled. Which reflects approximately zero real-world deployments except for the very low-end parts where Intel disables the Turbo modes for product segmentation.

In the video linked below at 6:55 he says the PI can consume up to 10 watts at peak. Referencing the Raspberry pi documentation^1 it says that the PI 4 consumes 600mA of power at typical bare board consumption. Looking at intel Ark^2 for a i5 sandy bridge shows a TDP of 95W. So it has the capability of pulling far more watts. Sure the Intel computer is much more powerful than the PI 4, but just as your computer is only using 20 watts of power in a NAS setting, the pi will probably be pulling far less than 10watts, especially when idling. So while not the lowest power you can get, still an incredible amount ratio for performance to power. I suspect that for a pi4 running 24/7 with cron jobs, the wattage will be far lower than what an older intel CPU would pull, but this is just a theory, I'd have to have the parts myself to test it out

1.https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry... 2. https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/52207/i...

The author discusses power requirements / power supply considerations of pi 4 + nvme at 6:44:

https://youtu.be/4Womn10v71s

its worth noting raspberry pis have no real power management too. i mean the cpu governors can down clock saving bulk of energy, but you cannot turn off cores