Also notably there are some low power options too. My first kube cluster was on these nice 2014 Acer Chromebox cxi's; they idled at 6w! Crazy slow 2957u Celeron processor, but I used it a node as my desktop for ~2 years (with 16GB ram). But it had gobs of USB bandwidth, mpcie wifi, sata, gigabit, and if i'd sprung for i3 models it probably would have been downright pleasant to use versus the 1.6GHz no turbo dual core I was getting.
Personally I've avoided the atom cores generally, but there's been a variety of decent low power offerings of big cores for a while. Heck, my Ultrabook tablet is ~6W when running, with screen on, with a i5-7200u. 15W TDP core with some additional TDP up available.
Point is, there's been a range of pretty low power x86 offerings. Just, not always super obvious.
I can't measure values below 10W myself, but with 2 SSDs and 8GB RAM it never goes above that value, even under full load.
[0] https://github.com/R3NE07/Futro-S740/blob/main/power_consump...
The nice thing about n100 Is its ability to disable the iGPU in the bios, saving you a little bit of power. But you have to reset the bios on the board to regain any output if you might need it later.
It is great that something on par is so affordable & even lower power though! And what I bought was a value because it was used, where-as now you can buy new. It's felt like the atom lineup was kind of slow rolling things & there hasnt been much availability for cheap AMD systems. These low price low power e-cores systems have really changed the game, have expanded the value proposition a lot versus the used-x86 mini PC or io limited ARM market's long stalemate.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/103253
E.g., Apple M2 Pro chip, 32GB unified memory, 8TB SSD.
What is your source? Because, according to the link shared by op, they can consume up to 50W or 100W depending on the model.
Remember: single-core, ARMv6Z 32b, 700 mhz in-order, using USB 2.0 as a system bus and booting over that same shared 500mbps-unidirectional system bus, with 256mb memory. Versus dual-core x86 64b 1580 MHz out-of-order with a proper SOC design, and also having dedicated USB 3.0 for peripheral connectivity, with 2GB memory.
For say $80-100 loaded on a rpi vs $100-125 on a Liva/Liva X it was a no-brainer even at the time, and the liva still sipped power (because it was using e-cores). The 1B+ model improved things a little (512mb) but still, not a good showing for a product that competed directly with these x86 nettop machines.
And in the grand scheme of things... 1w idle/5w load vs 3w idle/12W load is not anything you're ever going to notice, especially given the massive increase in performance it afforded.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/8262/ecs-liva-review-the-nett...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/8883/ecs-liva-x-review-a-fanl...
https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-Celeron%20N2807...
https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-Celeron%20N2808...
also, booksizes/nettops didn't materialize into existence in 2014 either. and you have to remember that the raspberry pi 2 didn't launch until 2015, so actually they were direct contemporaries for at least a year.
so if you wanted to run the early-adopter softfp distro on a $35[0] SBC in 2012 then sure, I agree, go for it. But there were turnkey solutions in the x86 space that weren't that much more expensive.
[0] $35 + $20 case + $15 adapter + $20 SD card + $20 SD card + $10 SD card + ....
Sure, it would have a case and WiFi in that price.
It would also miss GPIO header, which was major selling point of initial Raspberry Pi efforts (before it became so popular for other uses, when it was still targeting education).
A lot of then-common phone chargers worked. A random SD card wasn't that much of an issue. A kit with charger, NOOBS SDcard, and random assortment of extra bits to play with the electronics regularly could be acquired for ~100 USD if not less.
If I wanted to play with small-size BayTrail x86, Liva was fine choice. If I needed a small general purpose computer, too.
Not a very good choice if I wanted to graduate from Arduino towards somewhat more capable setup without requiring either expensive I/O boards or hacking an IO board out of Arduino or another MCU.
https://i.imgur.com/dnJACSd.png (these had a $25 rebate)
these were $115 barebones iirc (add SSD and memory). https://www.servethehome.com/zotac-zbox-bi320-u-w2-review-so...
$180 loaded for the whole thing (and this is indicative of what I paid for ssd+memory at the time, etc) https://i.imgur.com/9nmBQ0V.png https://i.imgur.com/I98CS6i.png
like idk what to say dude but MSRP reviews aren't always reflective of street prices back then, things used to go back on clearance sales before moore's law died.
yes, you absolutely could get x86 stuff that was price-competitive with the rpi once you loaded it up. the $35 price is, as I have stated, a red herring considering all the stuff that nobody had on-hand in 2012 like proper usb chargers that could run a rpi stable, plus the massive kernel problems involved for the first few years.
It's $100 loaded cost for a raspberry pi 1b or 1b+ that doesn't even work, because of kernel bugs I already linked, or just buy x86 for $75-180 and get something an order of magnitude faster that actually works and runs standard x86 distros and drivers. Stop comparing 1/3 of a pc to a out-of-the-box pc as if the price means anything at that point, this is getting to be bad-faith.
Especially when the product didn’t fucking work.
Like it’s the same damn story as ROCm, right? People want serious financial consideration as if they have delivered a working product, minus the delivering the working product. Come back in 5 years when your product works.
I will sell you a brick with a piece of paper that says “10,000 tflops” taped to it. The perf/$ will be out of this world, but there will be some “usability issues”. PM me for details.
The product in title uses a rp2040 for gpio.
I for one prefer the raspberry products (nice sdk for pico and much more features for not that much more power use/cost on pi zero)
I do have ESP32s as well but they're mostly stuck to micropython.
You need to be very naive to think that replacing rPi with a completely different thing will not bring any problems. Hell, even changing the rPi model does!
This "little computer land" is flaky and hard, and rPi matters because it gives at least some common ground. I wish it'd be more universal, but it's not.
There are some very noble projects (like PostmarketOS for phones, and Armbian for SBC) who try to be "mainline first" to keep these fascinating little devices going longer (and more reliably). They do an amazing job considering what they have to work with, but these are not big companies with a lot of resources behind them, so if you care about this sort of thing (not you specifically, that's for anyone reading) then consider perhaps lending a hand (or a few bucks)!
Cheers! :)
It's not even close, not even in the same order of magnitude.
The problem is not "sbc", the problem is "arm sbc"
Running on a random "unsupported" x86 board is no more of a problem than an unsupported laptop. There are sometimes no drivers for some peripheral but it's nothing like arm where you can't even boot without a dtd and most of the hardware has some freak custom interface instead of just pcie and usb and well known chips.
Every single arm board is like it's own whole different platform. A Bananna Pi Foo A and a Bannana Pi Foo A+ both with nominally the same cpu and specs might as well be a trs-80 and an appollo guidance computer when it comes to bringing them up.
The ECS Liva would cost me €200 (€278 when avoiding webshops that look like scams) without memory. An RPi5B is €88. I don't think I'll get more than twice the use out of an ECS Liva if all I want to run is Pihole.
And remember, the point of the Raspberry Pi was not to bring a cheap, high performance computer to prototypers. It was created to aid schools in teaching kids about computers. They've changed their tune ever since just about everyone with a computer project started buying out their reserves, but making things easy for professionals was not part of the plan from the start.
If you have cheap access to better computers, make good use of that! I still find the RPi to be competitive for cheap, low-power compute, though.
At the time, I bought one Liva for $100 and then two Liva Xs for $125 each a year or so later. All of them were 2gb memory/32gb emmc models.
Unfortunately it's not cheap, although the same functionality could be offered by a USB equipped small microcontroller "sniffing" 2 wires from a pass-through HDMI port.
I go into this in my previous comment that I linked above, but I think it was a shitty product for that niche too. The original non-microSD version had massive problems with the SD cards slowly softening and deforming enough to cause unreliable contact with the socket, which was one of the failure modes that caused corruption.
Another were the power brownouts, etc. People forget because usb chargers have gotten so much better over the years but 10 years ago a regular usb charger could generally not run a raspberry pi stable under load. Worse, it would appear to be stable and just silently corrupt the SD card due to voltage brownout (writes don't "stick"). Today we are seeing the same problem with the RPi 5s, where they have simply exceeded the capability of what can be delivered at 5V and aren't reliable.
You could not even PXE boot them without having a SD card installed to provide the blobs, so there was no getting around this at the time.
Pointing to the "you can pull the SD card and reflash it!" as being some kind of massive advantage is ignoring the massive downsides the SD card brought with it, again especially until they finally switched to microSD so the cards didn't melt and warp. I cannot fathom someone trying to run a computer lab on raspberry pis, that would have fucking sucked.
I will say, when the scalping of RPi happened over the pandemic, a lot of the x86 mini-pcs became a much better option in terms of TCO. I invested a bit into DeskPi cases for 8gb RPi 4b models. In the end, a $150 or so N100 box is a much better deal, with the case, psu, memory and storage. But it, of course, depends on what you're doing or trying to accomplish.
This is why some hardware projects reply on it and the intricacies of its GPIO timing.
I agree that if you want a small computer to run your home NAS on, then sure, there might be better alternatives.
But if you want to (say) plug one into your old Amiga (with a PiStorm) so that it emulates the CPU's bus timings and runs as an incredibly fast M68000 CPU, there's no way around the RPi (unless you want to do a lot of hardware development yourself... if that's even possible since on most of these Chinesium clones, the GPIO is hidden behind a ton of bridges, busses and/or MCUs which would kill the latency in those tightly constrained use-cases)
I assume nobody would bother porting the hardware-related code to the "Chinesium Clone of the Week" every few months
the best argument for rpi has always been the combination of GPIO and linux. But that's a double-edged sword too, because linux isn't really very good at hard-realtime. And you can always just get a Bus Pirate or similar tool for doing just plain GPIO. And nowadays the ESP32 has basically completely displaced it for a lot of those sorts of "GPIO glue" roles.
If you didn't need that, like if you just wanted a low-power fileserver or HTPC... the x86 stuff was better, because it actually worked reliably, at roughly the same price. Like literally just go buy an off-lease mini-tower or USFF mini-pc for $10 from a surplus store, even.
This goes doubly when you consider all the problems with the early rpi. Like basically it uses USB 2.0 (unidirectional 500mbps) as a system bus... but it also dropped USB packets under load due to bugs in the firmware[0], that nobody outside the Pi foundation could address because Broadcom didn't release the documentation for like 5 years.
[0] https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/19
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40701297