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Looks like fun ... but I am getting the new Mac Mini.
by throwaway4good 6y ago
Looks like fun ... but I am getting the new Mac Mini.
- throwaway4good 6y agoThanks for the deserved downvotes. But in terms for actual cost and performance; how does this compare in terms of peak performance, power consumption and actual total cost to mass produced quality hardware like the Apple Mac Mini? I don't the actual numbers but I have the feeling it won't fare that well.
- Tepix 6y agoFor starters it has 14x 8GB RAM, 7TB SSD, 14x GBit and 14x4 A72 cores. Not too shabby.
- throwaway4good 6y agoFor practical purposes 8 high performance cores will be much more performant that 56 cores with lower performance; in particular if the cores are spread over 14 physical machines.
- rovr138 6y agoThat depends on the task.
- throwaway4good 6y agoI challenge you to find a single application where a setup of 14 raspberry pi's will beat the new mac mini.
- AlexSW 6y agoSomething IO-bottlenecked maybe?
- throwaway4good 6y agoMaybe. But you have a network bottle neck between the 14 separate computers that you have on a single computer. If you have a computational task you split in 56 pieces and run it across the setup, you can utilies the cores fully. However even in that case I think the Mac Mini will outperform this. You can use it as a USB-hub though as I suppose you get 2 USB-ports pr. raspberry pi.
- ies7 6y agoMaybe some ram based application? Opening 100gb csv in pandas? Redis with more than 8gb data?
- throwaway4good 6y agoI doubt it - each cpu core only has access to the 4 or 8 GB that is on its machine - to communicate to other parts of the setup it will have to go over network or a shared drive. I think that will be much slower than a highly integrated device like the mac mini just using its hard drive.
- arnd 6y agoIt was apparently built for a very specific use case (doing CI for some application) so I guess it has to be ARM Linux. You can run Linux in a VM guest on Mac mini, but some limitations remain: - The project was obviously started before the Mac mini was available - Linux guests are still rather experimental and might not behave the same way as a real machine. - 32-bit Arm applications do not run on the M1, it is a 64-bit-only CPU - Nested virtualization is said to not work yet under MacOS, so you cannot run KVM guests inside of the Linux guest - If you need to spin up lots OS instances simultaneously to test various setups and each of them need 8GB, you can have at most 2 instances on a Mac. For most use cases, none of those apply, so you would be better off with a Mac, a Graviton instance or an off-the-shelf PC.
- Tempest1981 6y agoControlling several hundred WS2812B LED strips, perhaps? Or a kiosk with 14 HDMI displays.
- throwaway4good 6y agoSure. But wouldn't you then put the computer inside the display?
- Tepix 6y agoHere's one off the top of my head: Serving web pages. A single Raspberry Pi 4 can manage 943 Mbit on its Gigabit port. You might be able to buy (expensive) 40 Gigabit network adapters for the two TB4 ports of the Mac Mini. You'd still be slower.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoObviously in terms of single-core performance your Mac (or any desktop system for that matter) will always do better. As for actual power consumption, it always depends on the load and additional devices connected to the Pis. The only easily comparable aspect is the price, but it's meaningless on its own.
- smarx007 6y agohttps://uplab.pro/2020/10/raspberry-pi-mini-case/ https://uplab.pro/2020/10/raspberry-pi-mini-case/ got you covered ;)
- StavrosK 6y agoThat is nice print quality, especially that top sheen from printing on glass.