> : the launch of a new 2GB configuration of the Raspberry Pi 5, available starting today for $50. That's $10 less than the 4GB configuration and $30 less than the 8GB version of the board.
I'll gladly pay the $30 for 8GB (4x) more ram. Pretty much every time.
If it's really a low resource situation, I wouldn't bother with a Pi and would go for an ESP* system instead. Like everyone already does.
There's a huge difference between an ESP32 and a RPi5 (even w/2GB of ram). If you're using it for some specific appliance that needs a decent CPU, USB, Video output etc, but only requires 2GB of RAM, I don't see why you would pay the extra $30.
Here's the protocol I use: for any new project first use the 8GB version. Let it settle for a while, then check what do I actually need, and swap the board for a cheaper one. Minimizing the specs makes sense it you have many RPis running a variety of projects. If you just have 1 board that is a catch-all device for your small projects/services then by all means go wild. But then I'd actually recommend an x86 NUC (if GPIO is not needed). You can buy a new or even better a used one very cheaply.
Good point. One potential drawback is that there's a metric ton of software already written for the RPi's GPIO. Plus all the HATs. Heck, you can even transmit straight from the pins [noisy and likely noncompliant] radio signals using some DMA tricks!
I bought a used Asus Chromebox cn60 for $22, it has a 1 x Celeron 2955U @ 1.4 GHz tossed in 16gigs of ram for an additional ~$15 and a 256gig m.2 ssd for ~$18. All in under $60 for an x86 based cheap low powered home server running Debian. Running several docker containers for over a year and a half now, rock solid. Runs pihole, home assistant, an imgur clone for my wife and all runs through a cloudflare tunnel.
Sounds like this is a use case where none of size, power & cost matters very much, and faster development is desired. It may even prefer "heavier" libraries if it makes development easier. Which is completely different from most consumer devices and many commercial devices.
Well, if that's true, have to agree raspberry pi may be better than esp32.
I just really like ram, fomo, don't want to run out. You're already spending $50 + tax, $80 for 4x more ram is a bargain.
I grew up on machines chronically starved, think 16MB for Mac system 5-7, and 32MB for win98 :) (which leaked like a mofo, reboot required every 20 minutes.)
It's only a bargain if you need it. For a general purpose computer I'm with you, but the Pi5 often isn't used as a general purpose computer so if you know the software isn't going to be using it then it is pure waste.
You're absolutely right. I'd say for a specific application, I'd guesstimate you probably want it to be using something like 80% of the RAM when it's running full-tilt, maybe you'd want some headroom for upgrades.
Pi's aren't a great value for general purpose computing when cube-PCs will get you orders of magnitude more power and functionality for 2-4x the price, and people often neglect to factor in the price of a case, PSU, storage which stack up the cost rapidly.
Every generation I grab a couple of the latest model-B and run a few quick desktop tests to see where they're at subjectively (no benchmarks, just boot it up and "use" it) and Pi 5 is still orders of lower than what I expect from a computer.
Put them to work in a specific application and their reliability and great ubiquity shine; I have a couple of Pis in 3D printers, one powering a touch-screen dashboard, a couple in my server rack for Hashicorp Vault, Unifi Server, ARM build server, a half a dozen or so in home-made speaker/TTS devices, a couple in retro gaming-handhelds, one in a dedicated WiFi AP for MiTM/testing/traffic-inspection, and one with a NVMe HAT running a file-server for low-power network storage.
Each Pi serves a purpose, and I've allocated a device a specific model based on its requirements; a couple of them are probably over-powered just due to having a specific Pi spare, but I try to shuffle them around to be using the weakest/cheapest Pi available that suits the purpose.
> Pi's aren't a great value for general purpose computing when cube-PCs will get you orders of magnitude more power and functionality for 2-4x the price
Eh, not orders of magnitude more. An RP5 is like 25% of the speed of an Apple M3.
Yes definitely. In my experience I've only ever had to cool models from the Pi4 upwards. Of course the number of them I'm running is small, so it's anecdotal, but over years since the launch of the first Pi (which I still have), they're all still chugging along, with all but the Pi4s and Pi5s completely un-cooled (no heatsinks or fans).
I'm sort of whining a bit. I'd like it if they still kept a weaker Pi that doesn't require cooling in production. Not the Zeros though, full featured ones.
RAM FOMO is a real thing indeed. Switching from Windows to Linux is how I caught it; suddenly, having not enough RAM was no longer a minor annoyance, but a critical problem preventing use of the machine.
For me the experience was quite different. On windows I was constantly out of RAM for some reason, windows idling was already chewing through 6 GBs and didn’t seem to free a lot when memory pressure increased. On Linux I barely run into RAM issues anymore since everything seems to run more efficiently
The problem with expanding page files is that by the time you really need them (they are expanding a lot) you might be past the point of no return where just hitting the power button is your best option.
Once you are using a lot of paging, chances are performance has fallen through the floor to the point where doing anything to fix it (killing run-away processes, closing other processes (killing those that won't go willingly)) takes so long that you are fighting a losing battle. This is less of an issue with fast SD drives than it is with spinning rust (or slow SD cards / eMMC with some smaller devices) but still essentially the case.
I just have enough swap defined for some small unusual circumstances and assume that if I need more than that things are falling over anyway so OOM taking things our is not going to make it worse (if they continued to thrash I'd have to kill them anyway).
Probably the Raspberry Pi Zero ($10, and Zero 2W - $15). The latter has 512MB RAM, quad core A53. There might be more powerful microcontrollers as well but as you say they're probably more obscure (and expensive).
The Parallax Propeller 2. It's pretty easy to code for, has plenty of horsepower, and it's very robust electrically. I use it as standard for most of my autonomous stuff.
The Propeller 2 sits nicely between the two. I use it for autopilot things. The only bad thing is that it doesn't have integrated wifi, so it wants an esp8266 or similar to talk to.
Of course. I meant that once you have your product working, if you see 2GB is more than enough you can save a bunch of money in production without spending much or any extra time.
Moving your product to an MCU, even when it would support it well (which is not the case for a lot of RPi uses) will usually be a lengthy endeavor. But it's just HN being HN, I guess.
Here's an example. A few years ago I was contracted to build a device that would input some data, do real time signal processing, and output the data in a different format. The quickest and probably cheapest way to get it done was to use a $15 analog chip to do the bulk of the processing. I based that board on an Arduino Nano (clone, of course!).
A year or two later, much faster microcontrollers like ESP32 had arduino support and were trivial to use. A single ESP32 would probably have replaced most of the other components on my board, reduced inventory required, reduced power consumption and a host of other benefits.
But I never bothered because there was no economic pressure to do so. I was selling a $300 device to a single customer who didn't care about the price, and I had better things to do with my time than redesign a board that worked perfectly.
TBH, if I wanted to, I could probably have increased the price of the current board by the same amount that redesigning with an ESP32 would have gained me.
This is one reason I avoid consumer products like the plague. I'd rather work with people to whom there's no effective difference in cost between $300 hardware and $700 hardware because the benefit to them far exceeds what I'm charging.
> I'll gladly pay the $30 for 8GB (4x) more ram. Pretty much every time.
But why? SBC are not supposed to be used as a general purpose computer. They're supposed to be used for some single task. If this task requires 2 GB RAM, why would you pay more for unused RAM? That makes little sense.
Of course if you're building a personal computer, home server or something like that with unspecified tasks, that makes sense.
> SBC are not supposed to be used as a general purpose computer.
Why not? We have smartphones with ridiculously powerful specifications. I use Termux for software development. No reason we can't have computers in the same form factor.
I'm planning to buy a clockwork pi uconsole specifically because it's a handheld Linux computer with a physical keyboard.
For a general purpose home server/lab device that doesn't have a predefined use case and which might run different software over time, I agree the added memory gives you much more flexibility.
However, there are plenty of people using Pis in the maker space and embedded world where the device will just run one piece of software for the rest of its life, and often 2GB will be enough. This device is for those types of use cases, and offer substantial cost savings for them.
That is a very different situation, ESP8266 looks highly appealing if you need it in bulk. Optimize the app into a low resource C program and live happily ever after.
Look at what all the best volume manufactured custom and smart devices are based on these days.. it's ESP :)
I have no clue why people here are comparing a Raspberry Pi with an ESP32, while those products have some tinkering overlap, they are entirely different product categories.
Your Raspberry Pi will have some difficulties running from battery for months while your ESP will already have a hard time driving a reasonably high resolution display for HMI
> I have no clue why people here are comparing a Raspberry Pi with an ESP32
The usual HN discussion of RPi goes something like this:
"The RPi 5 has gotten too expensive, these days intel small-form-factor PCs (possible second hand) are a better choice, giving better performance and no messing around with microsd cards"
"I need GPIOs, sub-3-watt power consumption, and I don't need the performance of the most expensive RPi model"
Well, yes, but to lots of people they use it for the same thing. You can find projects people post online that uses raspberry pi to control a basic motor, which is a bad use of raspberry pi and a horrendous waste of resources. But people do that. You understand the difference but not others.
It's an even worse calculation when you consider that going from 8 GB to 12 GB of LPDDR4X costs only $7 to use the larger chip. If I'm already paying over $100 after customs then I'll also pay another $10 for 50% more memory ffs.
The price is already uncompetitive for the hardware so might as well throw in all the bells and whistles, since anyone who's buying these is doing so for the software support ecosystem anyway.
I wondered how the real price of the Pi has changed since launch and looked it up. Apparently the launch price in 2012, $35, is equivalent to $47.95 today. So this is pretty close.
Assuming prices for this type of device rise at the same rate as CPI.
In practice, the inflation rate for most sectors is very different to the CPI average, so these “adjusted for inflation” numbers are pretty meaningless.
Normalizing to CPI gives you a decent comparison of cost, normalizing to industry gives you a decent comparison of competitiveness. CPI is the correct choice, industry-normalized would fail to show changes like the whole industry jacking up prices.
>In practice, the inflation rate for most sectors is very different to the CPI average, so these “adjusted for inflation” numbers are pretty meaningless.
That's a good point that people often ignore. It's especially relevant when talking about technology, where pricing tends to fall, not rise. Pi feel like they should cost like $20 now considering they make them at way higher numbers than in the past and that the technology isn't anything particularly unique.
iPhone is, in some senses, a luxury good but they at least try to make the new versions have some features that justify wanting to buy a new one vs keeping your existing one. I guess no one needs a Pi either though, so maybe it is a better comparison than I initially thought.
Well for consumer goods what could be more "meaningful" is comparison to Disposable Income. I know it could be seen as a bit too socialist for the scientist to look at this over inflation, but if we are looking at how people value the meaning of the cost of fiat currency, it's clearly related to the people themselves.
Disposable Income (inflation-adjusted or proportionate to whole income) tends to go up and down with a different pattern to inflation (or housing which makes up most of inflation most of the time) but represents more the difference in cost to you for a consumer good (especially elastic ones). The picture is much less rosy but represents the median person this way, not tech workers.
They should be falling in price and gaining in capabilities. The "price" is the supply chain and transaction cost. With that structure in place, we should always be able to buy "the 40$" RPi that is what ever is great right now.
This seems like a product for commercial/embedded users who are happy to shave off the cost of resources they are not using. For consumers and hobbyists this 2GB model seems like a bad value proposition.
Entire RPi5 seems like a bad value proposition. There several usages where 2GB is sufficient, but for most of those the extra capability of the RPi5 is entirely overkill. And as such it is overpriced.
If you need the RAM then you're very quickly approaching N100 prices, and the N100 offerings give you way more expandability and performance.
I just don't get who the RPi5 is for, except maybe companies using them in embedded applications.
RPi has an ecosystem and great documentation. People use it for projects because every tutorial and YouTube video out there shows you how to get the job done with an RPi. There's a jillion expansion boards (HATs), hundreds of 3D prints, many ready to run OS images (selectable from an easy to use flashing tool), and even a first party camera module. The 40 pin GPIO header has stuck around unchanged thru all but the earliest hardware generations. Does the N100 offer that?
There are more performant and efficient alternatives, but for many hobbyists, prototypers, startups, and students (or rather, their teachers) it's not worth the extra time/headaches/hassle to start adapting an rpi solution to non-rpi hardware.
You completely missed my point. We already had the RPi4, and it was sold for $35 for the 2GB model. It was perfect at that. I had enough grunt, and 2GB was enough for a lot of use-cases. I still use mine for a lot of various tasks. One is my GPS-driven NTP server for example. Don't need lots of RAM for that, but do need the GPIOs.
What I said was, I don't get the RPi5 value proposition. It's fairly expensive so not just something you throw at simple tasks like an NTP server without consideration.
If you need grunt and RAM, well, why not just pay a bit more and get tons more of that? You get more PCIe, you get way more RAM, CPU and GPU, in a form factor that's not that much larger. And it's x86 so you're not facing the kernel support issues like OrangePi and friends.
In my experience, there's very little overlap between "need hardware GPIO pins" and "need 8+GB of RAM and/or lots of compute".
There's also the point that Pi5 actually took a step back from a Pi4 in some specific applications; It doesn't have the hardware video encoders the Pi4 had so for things like 3D printers (I use a Pi4 in my Voron) where you want the CPU concentrating on printing while the hardware encoders take off the load for video streaming from a camera, the Pi4 is the end of the line.
Totally in agreement with you though, even as a huge fan of Raspberry Pi, the Pi 5s are overkill for the tasks they're capable of, and overpriced and underperforming in the tasks a mini-PC can do for 2-4x the price (maybe less once you factor in a PSU, case, storage etc).
> It doesn't have the hardware video encoders the Pi4 had
Yea I included that under GPU, but spelling it out is a good point. A major step back. I use some of my Pi4s with a camera module for other uses, and rely on hardware encoding. The N100 can encode 4+ 1080p streams in hardware without breaking a sweat.
> maybe less once you factor in a PSU, case, storage etc
Most certainly. For a mini-pc application you'll need special USB power supplies, since the Pi5 doesn't fully support USB-PD (it won't accept >5V), so the USB-PD supplies you got for your phone, laptop etc probably won't cut it. And to use M.2 storage you need a separate HAT. And you want a case for it, and some cooling. Between those three, price for a 8GB RPi5 comes very close to a N100 box.
> And to use M.2 storage you need a separate HAT. And you want a case for it, and some cooling. Between those three, price for a 8GB RPi5 comes very close to a N100 box.
Now you mention it; I recently put together a Pi5 setup for low-power file-storage (portable), ~£80 for the Pi, ~£20 for the PSU, £5 for the cooler, £12 for a decent MicroSD, £16 for the NVMe HAT and £60 for an SSD, no case (total: £133), compared to the MinisForum Ryzen cube-PC I bought for a low-wattage server which cost ~£230, has 16 core Ryzen Laptop CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, PSU, nice case, etc; It's almost as portable, and orders of magnitude more powerful. Ok there's almost 100% price difference, but you get way, way, way more than 100% more of a computer for the price.
Clearly I can't count today, but yes, looking at it now, it's a _much_ worse deal for the Pi in hindsight.
The cube PC has really nice build quality, 32GiB SKHynix RAM, an extra PCIe slot, space for an additional DATA 3x4K display outputs, 2.5Gb networking, plenty of USB-C ports (don't remember which speeds) and a few USB-A (3.x) ports, active cooling, and although an anti-feature for me, came with Windows 11 out of the box (I blew it away and installed Debian) on a 1TB Kioxia NVMe drive.
I use it as a headless server but it's a powerful enough system that I'd absolutely use it as a desktop replacement for day-to-day work (development).
How's power consumption on those N100 boards these days? The RPi has always been quite good for the "I need to run a daemon but don't want to pay more than a USB charger's worth of power" segment. The N100 itself has a reasonable TDP but the boards and storage always seem to draw more power, especially at idle.
N100 boards run significantly hotter. Here's Jeff Greerling's counter argument on why Radxa X4 (a cheap N100 board) isn't a good replacement for RPI5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2atAHDOaIA
Yeah I'm not discounting it. My vanilla N100 box measures about 7W at the wall idling on the KDE Neon desktop. No modifications done to reduce power draw, and it includes the wall-wart that came with it.
it's probably a decent HD streamer. I have Kodi running on a pi2 (1GB) and it's OK at 720p but 1080 lags. The pi5 will do 1080, and might even pull off 4k depending on the source.
Yep. For applications where video isn't your main function, the Pi5 is a step back. In 3D printing (such as the Voron), where we want CPU cycles spent on printing, The Pi4 has to be used over the Pi5 if you want that hardware encoding for your camera stream so it's not eating up your CPU time and potentially ruining your prints.
There's an example in the comment you're replying to. A Voron [0] printer is designed around the Raspberry Pi as the default SBC.
It's an open-source 3D printer design, you want video encoding for your camera stream on the printer.
For projects intended to be built by ordinary people, a Raspberry Pi is a very accessible, reliable and well supported device with a track record, it's a no-brainer.
Your software might be targeting ARM, Pi boards are likely lower-power consumption than an N100 board, your application may not need the compute of an N100 (My Voron 2.4 is using about 20-30% CPU on a Pi4, while streaming (hardware encoding) a 720p camera feed, and printing at 400mm/s); the N100 launched last year; many projects built around Raspberry Pis are much, much older than that. There's _plenty_ of reasons to use a Pi over the N100. Also, N100 isn't an SBC it's a CPU, so who are you buying the finished board from, and what can you expect from them in terms of software and support? We know very well what to expect from RP at this point.
I'm not saying RPi is the answer to everything, but the N100 isn't the answer either.
I was mainly thinking about Plex/etc. servers where you might want to do high-res (or even just HD) encoding or multiple streams at the same time. Pi was always pretty horrible choice for stuff like that.
Yeah, I absolutely wouldn't use a Pi for something like that; a proper (mini) computer with a decent GPU (even an embedded one) is a better option for that sort of thing.
That said, there are still plenty of legitimate reasons to do hardware video encoding, as opposed to _transcoding_, which probably is what you're thinking of.
> there are still plenty of legitimate reasons to do hardware video encoding
But from what I understand Pi 5 still doesn’t have any HW encoder? So if your task relies on that you it basically loses its main advantage against the N100, lower power usage since you get it for free with Intel.
If we compare with the Pi5 yes, something like an N100 based board might be preferable (we should really compare the BCM to the N100, not the Pi itself).
Pi4 _does_ do hardware video encoding, so that is still a valid option for many applications; RP has a good record, decent board design, great software support and a huge community; if we compare with Radxa and their X4 for example; their track record is one of poor board design, poor software support and a miniscule community.
My personal opinion, and it's just that, my opinion based on my experience;
Unless I'm looking at an "embedded" task (board needs to go _inside_ a product), I wouldn't use an SBC; If I'm running Plex/Jellyfin/etc, I'd use a mini-PC or "bigger"; something with a better board design (there are questions about the board design of the Radxa X4 with N100 given its power envelope), proper cooling, better storage and GPU etc.
might be a pipe dream but it would be nice if this variant can stretch its legs without a fan. also in terms of the power supply needed, but maybe i might be pushing my luck too much on that front.
They are Some Intel N100 based boards in the pi5/OrangePi/BananaPi price range. They are more powerful and can have their power consumption capped to that of the Pis. What is still the value proposition of the pis?
As you said in your recent video though, it'd be more effort to use the GPIO due to the side-channel RP2040.
I was interesting in looking at the Radxa Zero 3 after one of your videos; for an application where I need the Zero form-factor but more power than a Zero 2W, unfortunately a quick look at the Radxa forums left me with the impression I'd spend half of my time fighting with poor software and general board issues, and there's only so many rabbit-holes I have the time and energy to go down these days.
Knowing you've tested a good selection of boards, can you think of anything in that FF that runs mainline Linux, or something close?
I have a couple of orangepi 5+'s that replaced a large, loud, power hungry server. with an attached nvme drive, iscsi connected over 2.5gbit ethernet, 8 cores, and 32gb of ram, they are quite capable.
one is the primary database, another runs everything else in docker containers.
With the popularity, one would assume we'd be able to get a CPU that's not a decade behind smartphones. Mine is now gathering dust; it's inefficient for the power it consumes.
The power consumption is genuinely worse than advertised (2x the draw of Pi 4, 3x the performance). The reality is a 3W idle minimum, 15W at full load, meanwhile the Pi 4 can idle at 1W and won't ever go over 5W. They're just about the same power per watt, the efficiency gains are zero.
For a NAS, surveillance, streaming and alike I think old smartphones are more efficient than modern Pi and analogies. They also have a screen, battery, less heating and other advantages.
I am not so sure about that unless maybe you mod them to extract everything from the original casing and add heatsinks and possibly a fan.
Also from a safety point of view, you'd need to make sure those can still be powered up without their batteries as I wouldn't trust a +10y old smartphone battery on a device that is running unattended 24h/365d/year.
my only issue with Orange Pi is that it can't run the Ubuntu images that work on the Pi, I have to use the armbian Ubuntu. i'm not quite for if the responsibility is on Canonical or the SBC manufacturer. i'm just saying it's one of the reasons why I have trouble getting started with the Orange Pi
price-wise, though, Orange Pi is unbeatable. the Raspberry Pi has no business being more expensive than an Intel NUC
Is that fan optional? I personally don't like SBC's with fans. I often use them for experiments and keep them exposed without a cover, so I don't want fans for that reason but also that it feels a lot less robust with a moving part.
So the first version of the BCM2712 was made by Broadcom for RPi and included RPi IP and also included unspecified dark silicon that RPi didn't want and was materially more expensive as a result?
Seems like an odd situation. Did Broadcom want to sell the BCM2712 to other customers and insisted on the more expensive design?
Afaik first pees were made by salvaging work from failed Nokia contract (700/800) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoCore Broadcom managed to sell same chip to Roku and some derivatives to Samsung. They havent been able to sell any of the new generations and this supposedly "slimmed down" chip is a sign of capitulation, realization that ship has sailed and Raspberry will be their lone client.
I cannot understand where people use...actually use rpi:s.
I have 2, 3, 4 and the small wireless. All of them crashes when left on more than few hours or days. can't use them for anything
This has not been my experience. I have used various generations of Pi for various 24/7 tasks over the years, and I've not found them to be particularly crash-prone.
> Price no longer match the reality, if you haven't already, look elsewhere, much better alternatives exist, much cheaper
... but without the software support and documentation side, be it upstream kernel support, libraries for interfacing with stuff like acceleration or GPIOs or whatever.
The biggest advantage of the RPi ecosystem is the community. Unless you're dealing with absolutely cutting edge stuff involving PCIe, chances are very high that someone else has already seen the problems you are facing and documented solutions.
Isn't this how most IPO ends up going.
Make self look good to shareholders by using the community to uplift the product.
Then, set up walled gardens to begin extrapolating funds from the community, as shareholders want more cash flow, damaging the contribution rate/trust of the community.
Finally, all out enshittification, its profits above all else, as the remaining contributing community have now bailed to a new, less draconian, platform. Now the Pi foundation needs to turn the screws on anyone that relies on the product in productive environments, to maintain the year on year financial growth.
This is a very cynical take on future events, but I wont be surprised if it goes this way, as was there actually a need to IPO?
We already had a massive shift away from hobbyists to industrial/commercial clients, before the IPO, so I don't see it getting better for hobbyist/enthusiasts. Costs will increase more, as they will see how their industrial clients make money from using a Pi in manufacturing process, and so the shareholders will want more of that slice from their clients.
The problem is that the competition in embedded is generally an utter pile of shit. Good luck even talking to some vendor if you're not willing to order 100k or more and don't have inside connections, BSPs (bootloader, kernel, userland libraries) are generally years out of date forked versions that barely build, and serious documentation is often behind NDAs...
RPi has a lot of room to sink before it gets threatened by the competition.
I don't think that SoC makes sense. Because of how the pad frame would work for the ddr and and pcie, you'd have a bunch of empty silicon if you only stuck a couple A73s and a simple GPU in it (and at this scale, the Ethernet is basically free).
the only way i have been able to use raspberry pi is the setup a mini screen to display my gif artwork whose screen is glued to CPU's AIO cooler as the screen one cooler was outof my budget :}
Pi and Arduino's are way overpriced as these organisations have become more and more commercial. I highly recommend buy cheaper boards like ESP 32 for personal IoT projects.
I'll gladly pay the $30 for 8GB (4x) more ram. Pretty much every time.
If it's really a low resource situation, I wouldn't bother with a Pi and would go for an ESP* system instead. Like everyone already does.