It's a good target if you want to provide something very close to a "turn-key appliance" without actually selling your own hardware: You can provide an image that a user writes to a microSD card, plugs in, and it just works.
For example: HomeAssistant [1] for home automation, OctoPi [2] 3D printer software, OpenElec [3] media center, RetroPi [4] game console emulator, Volumio [4] music player, and lots more [5].
[1] https://www.home-assistant.io/installation
Better yet - they boot from USB now (and even NVMe if you're using a CM4).
The biggest downside is your PXE server going down is going to kill all the Pis, so if you are doing something important you need a highly-available PXE setup. And if you have that, it's probably a better place to host a lot of the services people use Pis for in the first place.
I've setup a small office with 5 lines + 10 extensions all running on one of those (+ an analog line adapter), and it's been trouble free for the 3-4 year uptime so far.
Sadly, as our usage of the IP phones dwindled (cell phones, texting, and now conference software taking over), my significant other began evicting them from around the house ("too big and ugly"). A couple years ago, my instance was at the point I needed to do some major OS upgrades to it, and considering it was basically my office phone and a cordless left, I ended up retiring the Pi and PBX. Now I just register my last couple phones directly to my VoIP provider.
It looks like a Pi 4 can handle "dozens" of simultaneous channels (though depends on codecs used), and that would be my starting point if I got back into doing PBX work or deploying a system today -- though I'd probably run it from an SSD instead of SD card.
This is a great example of the benefits of the Pi hardware, too: People don't tolerate PBX downtime. With the Pi, it's incredibly cheap to have hardware for a failover server (try pricing that out on a commercial PBX!), and in an emergency you can run out and buy one locally or have it shipped overnight.
It's not mysterious. Making and supporting Raspberry Pis is the Raspberry Pi Foundation's thing. Wandering around in a confused state is Intel's thing.
The only one I'm aware of that's in the same ballpark is the Atomic Pi, which was apparently a limited production run using heavily discounted surplus components. It's not as popular as you'd expect given the $40 price point, which I assume is because there isn't anything like the same level of community support that the Raspberry Pi has.
Used Celeron NUCs are not more expensive, and they are way more powerful.
To me, they aren't always a better fit than an Rpi, but they often are.
Well, it's a Pentium 4 with 2GB DDR2 RAM... You may wish to search around a bit.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Optiplex-745-PC-SFF-Desktop-In...
HP T620 workstation ~$45 plus shipping?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-T620-Dual-Core-AMD-Gx217Ga-1-65G...
[1] https://hejdom.pl/blog/22-home-assistant/208-home-assistant-...
We can easily compare that on Linux with benchmarks. I'd say at the same price point for used x86, x86 is still much faster.
Cheap, robust, solid support and tools. Definitely hit the sweet spot for what we needed.
Raspberry Pi 3 was a Cortex-A53 back ported to 40nm outright.
Raspberry Pi 4 is on 28nm. (for comparison, Apple A8 and Snapdragon 810 were on 20nm already, in 2014-15)
It runs with a Cortex-A72 at a low clock (1.5GHz, phones even are at twice that clock nowadays) and quite high power consumption because of the process node.
The memory interface is narrow (32-bit bus, phones ship with a 64-bit bus and laptops/desktops with a 128b one) at a low data rate (LPDDR4-3200).
In addition to that, the CPU can only use 5GB/sec of it, with the remainder being reserved for the GPU only.
Those were some of the sacrifices needed to reach this price point. (and why it isn't representative at all of the performance of higher-end ARMs)
At the same time Intel was heavily subsidizing their x86 mobile SoCs to tablet manufacturers and for a while it was actually quite competitive price wise but it ultimately went bothered.
I have a _very old_ PN40 from Asus -- this is a full PC with an intel Celeron, a SATA SSD and about 8GB of RAM that idles at 1.7W (serving websites via GB Ethernet) as measured _at the wall_. This is just standard PC Linux distro with zero customization (other than `powertop --auto-tune`).
For comparison, the latest RPI4B without the SSD and with 1/8 RAM idles at 3.5ishW on the wall. Even the older RPI3 I could never get below 2W, and that is without any peripherals (no display, no Wifi, no eth, min USB) and significant tuning.
On the other hand the PN40 + components cost significantly more (probably close to 10x), and the CPU performance itself is not that good these days.
https://raspi.tv/2019/how-much-power-does-the-pi4b-use-power...
- The Odroid H2+ x86 board claims about ~4W idle power: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h2plus
- This measurement of idle power on the Raspberry Pi 4 says it uses ~3.4W: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/raspberry-pi-4
in the past as a relatively cheap x86 CPU. ($9.62 per unit)
However, it's a 400MHz 486 with some backports (1st generation Pentium, no MMX even) and broken LOCK prefix so that software specifically needed to be recompiled for it.
And at 2.2 W too, it never ended up succeeding anywhere, with no successor.
The right era pentium had the same LOCK prefix issue (we used to call it the F00F bug)
Edit: Thanks for link; I must have anchored on the instruction set and ignored that it was using the 486 pipeline.
"The new x86 CPU uses an old-school 486 scalar pipeline and the original Pentium instruction set with some modern enhancements"
Not quite direct competition, but pretty close. Maybe more directly similar to the Pi 4CM with a daughter card for NVMe, network, sata, etc.
Any possibility to transition from enterprise/cloud app dev, but with no comp Eng background?
Hardware-adjacent looks more interesting to me - would you say that I’m right or I’m wrong? :-)
The Pis really can do a lot too. Mine hosts a vpn, pihole, calibre-web, and a couple of other basic things. Really the only downside to the ARM based SBCs is they mostly use MicroSD cards, which probably are the greatest bottleneck in the system and mostly likely thing to fail.
As a dedicated, small, cheap computer for the “brains” of various hobbies and certain professional projects (at least where reliability isn’t the top concern)? Absolutely.
It’s by far the popular $35 Linux box out there. People create distros for all sorts of use-cases. Off the top of my head:
Pi-hole, RetroPi, Volumio, OctoPrint, Home Assistant, piAware, Plex/Kodi, many more.
Aren't there any Intel Celeron or some such super cheap x86 small boards? I imagine you'll get a ton more oomph, probably much better software support and they shouldn't cost that much more.