Re:Can My Water Cooled Raspberry Pi Cluster Beat My MacBook?
by willis936 on Friday March 26, 2021 @03:30PM
(#26595964)
You're calculating the raspi 4 power consumption based off of recommended USB power supply current rating. The actual expected load power consumption without peripherals is 1/5 to 1/3 of that (3-5 W rather than 15 W).
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...
https://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/power-consumption
https://raspi.tv/2019/how-much-power-does-the-pi4b-use-power...
Also: by the time you've wired up 8 raspis you end up using quite a bit of power just to connect them all together with a switch.
Raspberry Pi 4s need a maximum of 15 watts each. So 120 watts just for the computers. Even if you discount the power consumption of the switch, my 240 watt Ryzen computer is still going to beat that joule-for-joule.
Edit: one more thing, that 240 watt system also powers a 75 watt GPU, so it's definitely more wattage than really required for the CPU alone.