4 ms·

one big advantage pi had over minipc is a lot of the minipcs are in the 30 watt range while the early pis were single digit watts. that advantage has decayed ov

one big advantage pi had over minipc is a lot of the minipcs are in the 30 watt range while the early pis were single digit watts. that advantage has decayed over time though...

jauntywundrkind 2y ago
A good number of the mini PC's idle under 12W. My i5-6500t does. Yeah they ramp up under load to 30W, but a before rpi5 to start to ramp up like that would've been way more compute than an RPi could offer. Also notably there are some low power options too. My first kube cluster was on these nice 2014 Acer Chromebox cxi's; they idled at 6w! Crazy slow 2957u Celeron processor, but I used it a node as my desktop for ~2 years (with 16GB ram). But it had gobs of USB bandwidth, mpcie wifi, sata, gigabit, and if i'd sprung for i3 models it probably would have been downright pleasant to use versus the 1.6GHz no turbo dual core I was getting. Personally I've avoided the atom cores generally, but there's been a variety of decent low power offerings of big cores for a while. Heck, my Ultrabook tablet is ~6W when running, with screen on, with a i5-7200u. 15W TDP core with some additional TDP up available. Point is, there's been a range of pretty low power x86 offerings. Just, not always super obvious.
- Asmod4n 2y ago
  the n100 mini pc i got here runs at around 3.5 watts while running homeassistant with a unifi network server while having around two dozen devices connected. under debian 12 minimal.
  - craftkiller 2y ago
    How are you measuring that? I've been scouring the web for low-idle-power builds and 3.5 watts is far below the best builds I've found (assuming that 3.5 watts is measured at-the-wall).
    - Semaphor 2y ago
      The futro S740, popular with selfhosters in Germany, gets similar wattage for people [0]. On a slightly older CPU (J4105). I can't measure values below 10W myself, but with 2 SSDs and 8GB RAM it never goes above that value, even under full load. [0] https://github.com/R3NE07/Futro-S740/blob/main/power_consumption.md https://github.com/R3NE07/Futro-S740/blob/main/power_consump...
    - weweweoo 2y ago
      I've measured about 5w from the wall with Pentium J5005 based Dell thin client which has a tiny fan, one SSD, two RAM modules. No idea how N100 compares to J5005.
      - geerlingguy 2y ago
        N100 runs slightly hotter, I've seen it more like 6-8W
    - Asmod4n 2y ago
      Just a cheap measurement adapter you plug between the wall and cable. The nice thing about n100 Is its ability to disable the iGPU in the bios, saving you a little bit of power. But you have to reset the bios on the board to regain any output if you might need it later.
  - GTP 2y ago
    Sounds interesting, could you please share brand and model? Also, do you know how many SSDs/HDDs you can put inside? Could be a good replacement to have a low power NAS.
  - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
    Unless I'm running on battery, that's a pretty abstract win to me in the US. My i5-6500t's 10W for all 8760 hours of the year is 87kWh; less would be nice but my power bill is already under $10/year at that rate. It is great that something on par is so affordable & even lower power though! And what I bought was a value because it was used, where-as now you can buy new. It's felt like the atom lineup was kind of slow rolling things & there hasnt been much availability for cheap AMD systems. These low price low power e-cores systems have really changed the game, have expanded the value proposition a lot versus the used-x86 mini PC or io limited ARM market's long stalemate.
- hollerith 2y ago
  Apple claims that the latest Mac minis draw 7 W at idle: https://support.apple.com/en-us/103253 https://support.apple.com/en-us/103253 E.g., Apple M2 Pro chip, 32GB unified memory, 8TB SSD.
  - geerlingguy 2y ago
    Apple's still the only company that matches other Arm boards/servers on efficiency (perf/W) + idle power draw. AMD has been doing a little better, Intel slightly more so.
    - wpm 2y ago
      I am keeping an eye out for a cheap M1 Mac Mini on my local Craigslist because once you yank it out of its huge metal case, which is like half PSU, the board itself is quite small. Apparently, the PSU only outputs 12W across the entire power connector, so easily powered by a barrel jack. I quite like the idea of playing around with macOS as a SBC OS, but even just designing a smaller case with sufficient cooling would be fun too.
      - GTP 2y ago
        > Apparently, the PSU only outputs 12W across the entire power connector What is your source? Because, according to the link shared by op, they can consume up to 50W or 100W depending on the model.
        wpm 2y ago
        Whoops, meant 12V not 12W. Meaning it can be powered off of a big enough battery bank or a simple barrel plug power brick.
  - GTP 2y ago
    Interesting, but they can jump up to 50W or 100W depending on the model. Which such a big swing, you really need to consider your specific use case to see what will be the actual power consumption.
paulmd 2y ago
no, the booksize pcs of the time were pretty comparable to what you see today in terms of power. rpi was a bit cheaper and lower-power... but also vastly slower. Like a factor of 4x if not more (10x?). Remember: single-core, ARMv6Z 32b, 700 mhz in-order, using USB 2.0 as a system bus and booting over that same shared 500mbps-unidirectional system bus, with 256mb memory. Versus dual-core x86 64b 1580 MHz out-of-order with a proper SOC design, and also having dedicated USB 3.0 for peripheral connectivity, with 2GB memory. For say $80-100 loaded on a rpi vs $100-125 on a Liva/Liva X it was a no-brainer even at the time, and the liva still sipped power (because it was using e-cores). The 1B+ model improved things a little (512mb) but still, not a good showing for a product that competed directly with these x86 nettop machines. And in the grand scheme of things... 1w idle/5w load vs 3w idle/12W load is not anything you're really going to notice, especially given the massive increase in performance it afforded. https://www.anandtech.com/show/8262/ecs-liva-review-the-nettop-rises-again/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/8262/ecs-liva-review-the-nett... https://www.anandtech.com/show/8883/ecs-liva-x-review-a-fanless-bay-trailm-minipc/6 https://www.anandtech.com/show/8883/ecs-liva-x-review-a-fanl... https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-Celeron%20N2807.html https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-Celeron%20N2807... https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-Celeron%20N2808.html https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-Celeron%20N2808... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Specifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Specifications https://docs.rs-online.com/6403/0900766b8127da4b.pdf https://docs.rs-online.com/6403/0900766b8127da4b.pdf Rpi team had great marketing. But it wasn’t the only game in town even back then. Nettops existed for a long time. They just didn't have the full-court press in the glossies.
- p_l 2y ago
  RPi also released at $35 for Model B, two years earlier.
  - paulmd 2y ago
    Yes, that's always been the marketing gimmick. $35, for something with no case, no storage, no power adapter (and off-the-shelf adapters were not suitable at the time), that had a critical flaw with its system bus/all USB devices for the first 2 years of its existence. That bug didn't get fixed until feb 2014, which is basically the same time the liva launched. also, booksizes/nettops didn't materialize into existence in 2014 either. and you have to remember that the raspberry pi 2 didn't launch until 2015, so actually they were direct contemporaries for at least a year. so if you wanted to run the early-adopter softfp distro on a $35[0] SBC in 2012 then sure, I agree, go for it. But there were turnkey solutions in the x86 space that weren't that much more expensive. [0] $35 + $20 case + $15 adapter + $20 SD card + $20 SD card + $10 SD card + ....

one big advantage pi had over minipc is a lot of the minipcs are in the 30 watt range while the early pis were single digit watts. that advantage has decayed over time though...

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

A good number of the mini PC's idle under 12W. My i5-6500t does. Yeah they ramp up under load to 30W, but a before rpi5 to start to ramp up like that would've been way more compute than an RPi could offer. Also notably there are some low power options too. My first kube cluster was on these nice 2014 Acer Chromebox cxi's; they idled at 6w! Crazy slow 2957u Celeron processor, but I used it a node as my desktop for ~2 years (with 16GB ram). But it had gobs of USB bandwidth, mpcie wifi, sata, gigabit, and if i'd sprung for i3 models it probably would have been downright pleasant to use versus the 1.6GHz no turbo dual core I was getting. Personally I've avoided the atom cores generally, but there's been a variety of decent low power offerings of big cores for a while. Heck, my Ultrabook tablet is ~6W when running, with screen on, with a i5-7200u. 15W TDP core with some additional TDP up available. Point is, there's been a range of pretty low power x86 offerings. Just, not always super obvious.

Asmod4n 2y ago
the n100 mini pc i got here runs at around 3.5 watts while running homeassistant with a unifi network server while having around two dozen devices connected. under debian 12 minimal.
- craftkiller 2y ago
  How are you measuring that? I've been scouring the web for low-idle-power builds and 3.5 watts is far below the best builds I've found (assuming that 3.5 watts is measured at-the-wall).
  - Semaphor 2y ago
    The futro S740, popular with selfhosters in Germany, gets similar wattage for people [0]. On a slightly older CPU (J4105). I can't measure values below 10W myself, but with 2 SSDs and 8GB RAM it never goes above that value, even under full load. [0] https://github.com/R3NE07/Futro-S740/blob/main/power_consumption.md https://github.com/R3NE07/Futro-S740/blob/main/power_consump...
  - weweweoo 2y ago
    I've measured about 5w from the wall with Pentium J5005 based Dell thin client which has a tiny fan, one SSD, two RAM modules. No idea how N100 compares to J5005.
    - geerlingguy 2y ago
      N100 runs slightly hotter, I've seen it more like 6-8W
  - Asmod4n 2y ago
    Just a cheap measurement adapter you plug between the wall and cable. The nice thing about n100 Is its ability to disable the iGPU in the bios, saving you a little bit of power. But you have to reset the bios on the board to regain any output if you might need it later.
- GTP 2y ago
  Sounds interesting, could you please share brand and model? Also, do you know how many SSDs/HDDs you can put inside? Could be a good replacement to have a low power NAS.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  Unless I'm running on battery, that's a pretty abstract win to me in the US. My i5-6500t's 10W for all 8760 hours of the year is 87kWh; less would be nice but my power bill is already under $10/year at that rate. It is great that something on par is so affordable & even lower power though! And what I bought was a value because it was used, where-as now you can buy new. It's felt like the atom lineup was kind of slow rolling things & there hasnt been much availability for cheap AMD systems. These low price low power e-cores systems have really changed the game, have expanded the value proposition a lot versus the used-x86 mini PC or io limited ARM market's long stalemate.
hollerith 2y ago
Apple claims that the latest Mac minis draw 7 W at idle: https://support.apple.com/en-us/103253 https://support.apple.com/en-us/103253 E.g., Apple M2 Pro chip, 32GB unified memory, 8TB SSD.
- geerlingguy 2y ago
  Apple's still the only company that matches other Arm boards/servers on efficiency (perf/W) + idle power draw. AMD has been doing a little better, Intel slightly more so.
  - wpm 2y ago
    I am keeping an eye out for a cheap M1 Mac Mini on my local Craigslist because once you yank it out of its huge metal case, which is like half PSU, the board itself is quite small. Apparently, the PSU only outputs 12W across the entire power connector, so easily powered by a barrel jack. I quite like the idea of playing around with macOS as a SBC OS, but even just designing a smaller case with sufficient cooling would be fun too.
    - GTP 2y ago
      > Apparently, the PSU only outputs 12W across the entire power connector What is your source? Because, according to the link shared by op, they can consume up to 50W or 100W depending on the model.
      - wpm 2y ago
        Whoops, meant 12V not 12W. Meaning it can be powered off of a big enough battery bank or a simple barrel plug power brick.
- GTP 2y ago
  Interesting, but they can jump up to 50W or 100W depending on the model. Which such a big swing, you really need to consider your specific use case to see what will be the actual power consumption.

paulmd 2y ago

no, the booksize pcs of the time were pretty comparable to what you see today in terms of power. rpi was a bit cheaper and lower-power... but also vastly slower. Like a factor of 4x if not more (10x?). Remember: single-core, ARMv6Z 32b, 700 mhz in-order, using USB 2.0 as a system bus and booting over that same shared 500mbps-unidirectional system bus, with 256mb memory. Versus dual-core x86 64b 1580 MHz out-of-order with a proper SOC design, and also having dedicated USB 3.0 for peripheral connectivity, with 2GB memory. For say $80-100 loaded on a rpi vs $100-125 on a Liva/Liva X it was a no-brainer even at the time, and the liva still sipped power (because it was using e-cores). The 1B+ model improved things a little (512mb) but still, not a good showing for a product that competed directly with these x86 nettop machines. And in the grand scheme of things... 1w idle/5w load vs 3w idle/12W load is not anything you're really going to notice, especially given the massive increase in performance it afforded. https://www.anandtech.com/show/8262/ecs-liva-review-the-nettop-rises-again/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/8262/ecs-liva-review-the-nett... https://www.anandtech.com/show/8883/ecs-liva-x-review-a-fanless-bay-trailm-minipc/6 https://www.anandtech.com/show/8883/ecs-liva-x-review-a-fanl... https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-Celeron%20N2807.html https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-Celeron%20N2807... https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-Celeron%20N2808.html https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/Intel-Celeron%20N2808... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Specifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Specifications https://docs.rs-online.com/6403/0900766b8127da4b.pdf https://docs.rs-online.com/6403/0900766b8127da4b.pdf Rpi team had great marketing. But it wasn’t the only game in town even back then. Nettops existed for a long time. They just didn't have the full-court press in the glossies.

p_l 2y ago
RPi also released at $35 for Model B, two years earlier.
- paulmd 2y ago
  Yes, that's always been the marketing gimmick. $35, for something with no case, no storage, no power adapter (and off-the-shelf adapters were not suitable at the time), that had a critical flaw with its system bus/all USB devices for the first 2 years of its existence. That bug didn't get fixed until feb 2014, which is basically the same time the liva launched. also, booksizes/nettops didn't materialize into existence in 2014 either. and you have to remember that the raspberry pi 2 didn't launch until 2015, so actually they were direct contemporaries for at least a year. so if you wanted to run the early-adopter softfp distro on a $35[0] SBC in 2012 then sure, I agree, go for it. But there were turnkey solutions in the x86 space that weren't that much more expensive. [0] $35 + $20 case + $15 adapter + $20 SD card + $20 SD card + $10 SD card + ....