5 ms·

I have to think most Pi’s in the wild are sitting idle most of the time. How many people are using them in compute-intensive projects? I certainly don’t need mo

I have to think most Pi’s in the wild are sitting idle most of the time. How many people are using them in compute-intensive projects? I certainly don’t need more CPU to run a pihole or a rain gauge or whatever.

prepend 3y ago
I think it’s great to have more cpu. My kids built a Minecraft server on a 4S and it doesn’t perform that well. The small form factor is really convenient for turning on and off. Pis are designed for the edge case and that allows them to sit in drawers. If you design for the median only, then you’ll never get to median because people won’t be able to run and test the edge cases.
- bombcar 3y ago
  For things like that the Rock boards are much much more powerful. Of course as you go up costs rise and eventually you might as well buy a Mac mini or similar.
  - prepend 3y ago
    Yes, there’s obviously more powerful computers for running a Minecraft server. But pis are easy to build and manage and that’s the platform my kid likes.
_joel 3y ago
Maybe not the CPU per se but I'd imagine the extra beef GPU side could be good for digital signage and entertainment.
- humanistbot 3y ago
  The pi4 is powerful enough to drive multiple 4k displays while doing face detection from a camera.
mort96 3y ago
Being idle most of the time doesn't mean you don't need compute, there's a lot of use cases (usually-low-traffic web servers, for example) where you're idle most of the time but when something actually happens, you want to handle it quickly. I use a Raspberry Pi 4 to host a Nextcloud instance. It's sitting idle most of the time, but the weak CPU of the Pi 4 (combined with a fast connection and the fact that Nextcloud is a terrible pile of slow PHP) means that syncing lots of small files is actually CPU limited. (Seriously, I set it up on the Pi 4 thinking that Nextcloud would be mostly IO limited. I wasn't considering the fact that its file syncing is based on WebDAV, and every single WebDAV operation is a separate HTTP request which goes to a freshly spun up PHP interpreter which has to go through all the work of connecting to databases and handle authentication and what not in order to write a 100 byte file to disk. Still, it works well enough for the small size and quiet of the Pi 4 is worth the trade-off.)
wayfinder 3y ago
That’s because for everyone who needs a beefier CPU, the Raspberry Pi 4 hasn’t even been on the table.
ep_jhu 3y ago
For my DCSkyCam project, htop shows 1.8 load average on my Pi 4B. It's always busy, with resources left to handle spikes based on what the camera detects (or post to mastodon/website). I'd say it's right-sized. Best part - not throttled, even without a case, fans, or even heatsinks. That probably wouldn't be the case with a Pi 5.
humanistbot 3y ago
Mostly agreed, but "sitting idle most of the time" isn't quite the right metric. The question is if it can handle the peak loads. And a pi zero can run pihole and a rain gauge. I don't plan to upgrade my rpi4 running homeassistant, a Plex video streaming server, a tailscale VPN exit node, and a few other minor services. Plex on the rpi4 can't keep up transcoding 4k video to 1080p, maybe the rpi5 can, but I don't personally need that. Many Plex users do need 4k transcoding though. Also, I have tried to use the pi4 as a desktop replacement, and I just found it too slow for the modern bloated world of webapps. All the little things just added up to too much and I gave up. The pi5 might be good enough though, but with all the peripherals and pains of arm64, a used old laptop is still probably better on the price/performance ratio.
regularfry 3y ago
I've got a zero 2 sat next to me that's got uncomfortably warm because I've been pushing too much at it. What I've been trying to do is get it to chew through whisper.cpp at anything like a reasonable rate. It can so nearly do it with the right sized model, the latency isn't good enough yet, but the reason I'm doing this on a pi zero 2 is because of the USB-OTG port. I can take the whisper.cpp output, and have the pi pretend to be a USB keyboard, typing what it hears into a second machine over USB. This gives you dictation capabilities in environments where upgrading the PC it's plugged into isn't an option. Like I say, it's not quite there yet in terms of usability, but it's close enough that I think the problem is just a matter of software (and arguably model) optimisation.
- fanf2 3y ago
  The Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 have USB OTG through their USB-C ports.
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    Those require a bit more power than a Pi Zero though. That's not necessarily a blocker but if the system OP is talking about only has USB2 ports a Pi 4/5 wouldn't be suitable.
- jonincanada 3y ago
  Sounds like some learnings around the lora gpt fine tuning that could be applied to the similar whisper transformer architeture /
johnklos 3y ago
I run BIND, Apache, sendmail, SearXNG, npf, and route a class C network over tinc on my 8 gig Raspberry Pi 4 with software mirrored disks. I just bought an Orange Pi 5 because it's much faster (it has four Cortex-A76 cores, just like the Raspberry Pi 5 and at the same clock, too, but it also has four Cortex-A55 cores, which are by themselves about the same performance as the Cortex-A72 in the Raspberry Pi 4). Moving to the Raspberry Pi 5 just isn't an option, because I'm already memory limited at 8 gigs, so 4 gigs would be unusable. I bought my Orange Pi 5 with 16 gigs, so I'm quite looking forward to doing the upgrade! Granted, there might not be too many other people putting this much work on Pis, but when you're power constrained, they're an excellent option.
spacechild1 3y ago
I have been using RPIs for multimedia art projects where I am running heavy audio and/or video processing, sometimes maxing out all available cores. So I am pretty excited about the new specs :)

prepend 3y ago

I think it’s great to have more cpu. My kids built a Minecraft server on a 4S and it doesn’t perform that well. The small form factor is really convenient for turning on and off. Pis are designed for the edge case and that allows them to sit in drawers. If you design for the median only, then you’ll never get to median because people won’t be able to run and test the edge cases.

bombcar 3y ago
For things like that the Rock boards are much much more powerful. Of course as you go up costs rise and eventually you might as well buy a Mac mini or similar.
- prepend 3y ago
  Yes, there’s obviously more powerful computers for running a Minecraft server. But pis are easy to build and manage and that’s the platform my kid likes.

_joel 3y ago

Maybe not the CPU per se but I'd imagine the extra beef GPU side could be good for digital signage and entertainment.

humanistbot 3y ago
The pi4 is powerful enough to drive multiple 4k displays while doing face detection from a camera.

mort96 3y ago

Being idle most of the time doesn't mean you don't need compute, there's a lot of use cases (usually-low-traffic web servers, for example) where you're idle most of the time but when something actually happens, you want to handle it quickly. I use a Raspberry Pi 4 to host a Nextcloud instance. It's sitting idle most of the time, but the weak CPU of the Pi 4 (combined with a fast connection and the fact that Nextcloud is a terrible pile of slow PHP) means that syncing lots of small files is actually CPU limited. (Seriously, I set it up on the Pi 4 thinking that Nextcloud would be mostly IO limited. I wasn't considering the fact that its file syncing is based on WebDAV, and every single WebDAV operation is a separate HTTP request which goes to a freshly spun up PHP interpreter which has to go through all the work of connecting to databases and handle authentication and what not in order to write a 100 byte file to disk. Still, it works well enough for the small size and quiet of the Pi 4 is worth the trade-off.)

wayfinder 3y ago

That’s because for everyone who needs a beefier CPU, the Raspberry Pi 4 hasn’t even been on the table.

ep_jhu 3y ago

For my DCSkyCam project, htop shows 1.8 load average on my Pi 4B. It's always busy, with resources left to handle spikes based on what the camera detects (or post to mastodon/website). I'd say it's right-sized. Best part - not throttled, even without a case, fans, or even heatsinks. That probably wouldn't be the case with a Pi 5.

humanistbot 3y ago

Mostly agreed, but "sitting idle most of the time" isn't quite the right metric. The question is if it can handle the peak loads. And a pi zero can run pihole and a rain gauge. I don't plan to upgrade my rpi4 running homeassistant, a Plex video streaming server, a tailscale VPN exit node, and a few other minor services. Plex on the rpi4 can't keep up transcoding 4k video to 1080p, maybe the rpi5 can, but I don't personally need that. Many Plex users do need 4k transcoding though. Also, I have tried to use the pi4 as a desktop replacement, and I just found it too slow for the modern bloated world of webapps. All the little things just added up to too much and I gave up. The pi5 might be good enough though, but with all the peripherals and pains of arm64, a used old laptop is still probably better on the price/performance ratio.

regularfry 3y ago

I've got a zero 2 sat next to me that's got uncomfortably warm because I've been pushing too much at it. What I've been trying to do is get it to chew through whisper.cpp at anything like a reasonable rate. It can so nearly do it with the right sized model, the latency isn't good enough yet, but the reason I'm doing this on a pi zero 2 is because of the USB-OTG port. I can take the whisper.cpp output, and have the pi pretend to be a USB keyboard, typing what it hears into a second machine over USB. This gives you dictation capabilities in environments where upgrading the PC it's plugged into isn't an option. Like I say, it's not quite there yet in terms of usability, but it's close enough that I think the problem is just a matter of software (and arguably model) optimisation.

fanf2 3y ago
The Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 have USB OTG through their USB-C ports.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  Those require a bit more power than a Pi Zero though. That's not necessarily a blocker but if the system OP is talking about only has USB2 ports a Pi 4/5 wouldn't be suitable.
jonincanada 3y ago
Sounds like some learnings around the lora gpt fine tuning that could be applied to the similar whisper transformer architeture /

johnklos 3y ago

I run BIND, Apache, sendmail, SearXNG, npf, and route a class C network over tinc on my 8 gig Raspberry Pi 4 with software mirrored disks. I just bought an Orange Pi 5 because it's much faster (it has four Cortex-A76 cores, just like the Raspberry Pi 5 and at the same clock, too, but it also has four Cortex-A55 cores, which are by themselves about the same performance as the Cortex-A72 in the Raspberry Pi 4). Moving to the Raspberry Pi 5 just isn't an option, because I'm already memory limited at 8 gigs, so 4 gigs would be unusable. I bought my Orange Pi 5 with 16 gigs, so I'm quite looking forward to doing the upgrade! Granted, there might not be too many other people putting this much work on Pis, but when you're power constrained, they're an excellent option.

spacechild1 3y ago

I have been using RPIs for multimedia art projects where I am running heavy audio and/or video processing, sometimes maxing out all available cores. So I am pretty excited about the new specs :)