I'm actually a large fan of the Pi but people seem to think it's lower power than it actually is: but the performance trade-off is real.
the -peak- power consumption of a Pi is 15W (but it's difficult finding an adapter which will supply that).
So if we're talking peak power consumption the Pi would win because most decent quality mobile x86 chips draw something like 15w by themselves at peak, but if you look at something with the m3-8100y[0] then you've got a CPU that draws 5w at peak, and has 10 PCIe lanes instead of just 1.
If you're looking to get a super low energy homeserver these absolutely dominate on peak usage.
But, a rpi and a laptop are roughly comparable in terms of idle power consumption. Unless it's like a gaming laptop or something. Mine draws 3w during "idle"* from the wall and I have a Xeon E3-1505M v6 (45W TDP).
Size? I’d never change my chinese x86, 10W TDP, mini-pc running OPNsense for a Pi. Its perfect size. But I have to use Pi for my drone video, nothing else will fit.
That’s fair. I’d also argue that the form factor has a good community around it.
I’m not saying there are no reasons. But people salivating at the Pis as a be all and end all of low energy devices are a bit annoying.
The Pi is primarily a tool for students and to a lesser extent: makers to get a general purpose computer to be as cheap as possible for the purpose of education.
But people want it to be home servers or to compete with other products of a higher price point. But it betrays the original purpose.
File servers (or most server apps generally) don't do much FP. And gflops counts tend to incorporate SIMD lanes to get many times bigger numbers than scalar code, which again is not used by most server apps.
I'm still stuck on SATA, don't see the point of NVMe because there is no application I want to write that needs that disk speed.
I use my servers as MMO backends, partly they will serve files, but mostly they'll do real-time networking and db stuff... some AI for the monsters and validation for anti-cheat so I need CPU more than fast storage or network.
I'm actually a large fan of the Pi but people seem to think it's lower power than it actually is: but the performance trade-off is real.
the -peak- power consumption of a Pi is 15W (but it's difficult finding an adapter which will supply that).
So if we're talking peak power consumption the Pi would win because most decent quality mobile x86 chips draw something like 15w by themselves at peak, but if you look at something with the m3-8100y[0] then you've got a CPU that draws 5w at peak, and has 10 PCIe lanes instead of just 1.
they have boards with this kind of platform: https://www.dfrobot.com/product-1404.html
If you're looking to get a super low energy homeserver these absolutely dominate on peak usage.
But, a rpi and a laptop are roughly comparable in terms of idle power consumption. Unless it's like a gaming laptop or something. Mine draws 3w during "idle"* from the wall and I have a Xeon E3-1505M v6 (45W TDP).
[0]: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/185282/...
- "idle" meaning with a few containers, a window manager, the screen turned on and wifi enabled/connected.