4 ms·

You can bring it down to around 3W with a few config tweaks. Mine averages about that. (edit: wrong board! I was thinking of my OPi5, not the Plus. My OPi5+ loo

You can bring it down to around 3W with a few config tweaks. Mine averages about that. (edit: wrong board! I was thinking of my OPi5, not the Plus. My OPi5+ looks like it's around the same as the author.) An M1 Mac is more powerful for sure, but for my use cases (my OPi5+ is being used as a video capture relay with its onboard HDMI capture and my two OPi5's are k8s nodes running Github Actions jobs) it would also be a lot more expensive.

rcarmo 3y ago
Did you change the CPU governor, or were there any more tweaks? I did measure this off the wall and there's always a bit more overhead in that situation, but I'm curious.
- eropple 3y ago
  Nope, I just remembered the wrong one. 3W on the OPi5, not the Plus. Mea culpa.
roughly 3y ago
I'm curious how much more expensive, though - the low-end mini is $600. I don't know how much each of the OPis is once you've added all the accessories to make them functional, but it wouldn't surprise me if all of performance/$, performance/watt, and actual total cost winds up being better with the mini once you've got more than one or two of the OPis running.
- eropple 3y ago
  A 16GB RAM OPi5 is $140 and a 16GB OPi5+ is $180, outside of sales. Both of my OPi5's have a small microSD boot volume and a 1TB NVMe drive that cost about $50, because when they're not doing arm64 builds for my GitHub projects, they also do some Longhorn volume replication in my home k8s cluster. My OPi5+ has a 2TB NVMe drive for video recording-to-disk. (I designed and 3D printed my own cases, so I didn't factor that in.) A Mac Mini that matches the important specifications here--and CPU performance isn't one of them, but memory capacity and disk storage are--is twelve hundred dollars. Before you add a capture card or the additional terabyte of storage for the video capture box. Also then I'd have to fight with Asahi Linux or something, because my workflows, while probably portable to macOS, already exist on Linux. I have no problem buying Macs, I have plenty. The Mini is not a replacement for the needs I described. The more general Ryzen mini-PCs are better competitors, and if you need more and faster compute are a better call at ~$230 to $400--a far cry from the Mac mini's pricing.
  - roughly 3y ago
    Yeah, you’re right - the math is a lot different when you’re looking at the memory and storage side of the equation.
    - eropple 3y ago
      I won't lie, I've thought about 3D printing a 2U or a 3U rack and treating them like really cheap blades. ;) Admittedly, as much for the hell of it as anything.

rcarmo 3y ago

Did you change the CPU governor, or were there any more tweaks? I did measure this off the wall and there's always a bit more overhead in that situation, but I'm curious.

eropple 3y ago
Nope, I just remembered the wrong one. 3W on the OPi5, not the Plus. Mea culpa.

roughly 3y ago

I'm curious how much more expensive, though - the low-end mini is $600. I don't know how much each of the OPis is once you've added all the accessories to make them functional, but it wouldn't surprise me if all of performance/$, performance/watt, and actual total cost winds up being better with the mini once you've got more than one or two of the OPis running.

eropple 3y ago
A 16GB RAM OPi5 is $140 and a 16GB OPi5+ is $180, outside of sales. Both of my OPi5's have a small microSD boot volume and a 1TB NVMe drive that cost about $50, because when they're not doing arm64 builds for my GitHub projects, they also do some Longhorn volume replication in my home k8s cluster. My OPi5+ has a 2TB NVMe drive for video recording-to-disk. (I designed and 3D printed my own cases, so I didn't factor that in.) A Mac Mini that matches the important specifications here--and CPU performance isn't one of them, but memory capacity and disk storage are--is twelve hundred dollars. Before you add a capture card or the additional terabyte of storage for the video capture box. Also then I'd have to fight with Asahi Linux or something, because my workflows, while probably portable to macOS, already exist on Linux. I have no problem buying Macs, I have plenty. The Mini is not a replacement for the needs I described. The more general Ryzen mini-PCs are better competitors, and if you need more and faster compute are a better call at ~$230 to $400--a far cry from the Mac mini's pricing.
- roughly 3y ago
  Yeah, you’re right - the math is a lot different when you’re looking at the memory and storage side of the equation.
  - eropple 3y ago
    I won't lie, I've thought about 3D printing a 2U or a 3U rack and treating them like really cheap blades. ;) Admittedly, as much for the hell of it as anything.