4 ms·

Power consumption is a good contender for reasons to stick with rpis. The rough, quick search numbers I'm seeing for idle power are ~6w for the N100 SCB and ~1

Power consumption is a good contender for reasons to stick with rpis. The rough, quick search numbers I'm seeing for idle power are ~6w for the N100 SCB and ~1 to 2w for the pi. Max performance is like ~15w to ~4w.

gjsman-1000 2y ago
Depends on where you live then. My home state of Minnesota has electricity for 11 cents per kWh, with only 19% coal. Very different than, say, Germany. Power efficiency becomes a much lower priority.
FirmwareBurner 2y ago
How often is that the case? Are you really saving so much more money with a 10W board vs a 15W system to offset the purchasing price?
- nine_k 2y ago
  It's like 1.5x longer run time on battery power :shrug:
  - brokenmachine 2y ago
    Most things I see rpi being used for would be better done at 1/10 of the power with an ESP32, STM32 or arduino. The things that need an rpi and therefore must use power from the wall anyway, I always find myself thinking would be better done by a minipc, eg one using a laptop cpu like a 7730U. Costs more, but you get like 3-4x the speed at a similar power use, and have much more flexibility on what OS you can use because it's a "proper" PC. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of rPi. I have a Pi Zero that I've used exactly once because I wanted to do something and I came across a project that did exactly what I needed that used rPi. I just find there's always a better option than rPi for every project I find myself doing.
  - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
    How many PIs did you see in battery powered applications?
  - chronogram 2y ago
    Is it really 1.5× longer in practice? The N100s are efficient, and you can simply choose a lower power profile by sending a different energy/performance preference to the CPU, and it finishes tasks quicker.
- icelancer 2y ago
  It's purely about battery runtime in these cases.
  - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
    How many battery powered applications did you see use a pi?
nine_k 2y ago
Also, a bunch of GPIO if you want to control some hardware, not just run a Linux desktop or a media server.
- blacksmith_tb 2y ago
  We are starting to see SBCs that bake in an RP2040 to drive some GPIO pins (without needing to tie up a physical usb port), which seems like a reasonable compromise... I do like the RPi Zero size/perf/price combo, but for anything that needs more horsepower it's hard to argue with the bigger NUC-a-likes.
  - teruakohatu 2y ago
    Yes there are N100 SBCs including a RP2040, so best of both worlds.
    - sthlmb 2y ago
      It’s not quite as seamless though, sadly, it’s just the same as having a Pico plugged in via USB but it’s a good step, even if the X4 (assuming that’s what we’re referring to) has some other flaws!
  - nxobject 2y ago
    Especially when you want to work with PIO as well. Well, either way Raspberry Pi gets paid.
  - qhwudbebd 2y ago
    Do these give you decent performance DMA-able gpio and spi like you get even on a cheap rpi4? (I'm not claiming they don't/can't, just that it isn't immediately obvious to me that they would.) For example, spi is an easy hack to bit sample a digital level and stream the results into memory for later processing. You can effortless do this at 20MHz+ plus on an rpi4. When you want to stream multiple digital levels simultaneously (in sync), DMA on gpio is a nice generalisation. (Could perhaps abuse I2S inputs too, which might be present on a more generic x86 board?) I always wonder about a nice PCIe board supporting good DMAable gpio/spi/i2c/etc on standard x86 machines. I'd probably pay a fair amount of money for a quality one. But it's a product I've never seen on the market. Bodging a USB gpio interfaces with one of the relatively low spec chipsets seem like a pale, inefficient and high-latency imitation. Actually, given the RP1, maybe the rpi5 has slow/non-DMA gpio too? I haven't been able to check it out yet as these boards still don't have mainlined linux support and I'm not up for buying toys that don't. (Am I imagining it, or did they used to be a lot better at mainlining support for their boards promptly?)
mardifoufs 2y ago
Wait, which raspberry pi are you talking about? Max performance on a rpi5 is closer to 20 watts technically, and a bit less than that usually because of thermals. But it's not 5 watts, at least nothing I've seen indicates that. The official rpi5 charger provides 5v5a, so 25 watts. And a lower power mode is used when a "standard" 15w charger is used.
Aurornis 2y ago
> Max performance is like ~15w to ~4w. Peak power from the Raspberry Pi 5 is 12W, according to Raspberry Pi themselves: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/ The N100 SBCs have a much higher peak power and heat, but it's also fine to let them throttle down. Really though, I think most hobbyists would be perfectly fine with a base model 2GB RAM Raspberry Pi and a cheap USB to NVME enclosure. It's not optimal, but it works and you're not spending money to hot-rod something that will never be all that fast anyway.

gjsman-1000 2y ago

Depends on where you live then. My home state of Minnesota has electricity for 11 cents per kWh, with only 19% coal. Very different than, say, Germany. Power efficiency becomes a much lower priority.

FirmwareBurner 2y ago

How often is that the case? Are you really saving so much more money with a 10W board vs a 15W system to offset the purchasing price?

nine_k 2y ago
It's like 1.5x longer run time on battery power :shrug:
- brokenmachine 2y ago
  Most things I see rpi being used for would be better done at 1/10 of the power with an ESP32, STM32 or arduino. The things that need an rpi and therefore must use power from the wall anyway, I always find myself thinking would be better done by a minipc, eg one using a laptop cpu like a 7730U. Costs more, but you get like 3-4x the speed at a similar power use, and have much more flexibility on what OS you can use because it's a "proper" PC. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of rPi. I have a Pi Zero that I've used exactly once because I wanted to do something and I came across a project that did exactly what I needed that used rPi. I just find there's always a better option than rPi for every project I find myself doing.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  How many PIs did you see in battery powered applications?
- chronogram 2y ago
  Is it really 1.5× longer in practice? The N100s are efficient, and you can simply choose a lower power profile by sending a different energy/performance preference to the CPU, and it finishes tasks quicker.
icelancer 2y ago
It's purely about battery runtime in these cases.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  How many battery powered applications did you see use a pi?

nine_k 2y ago

Also, a bunch of GPIO if you want to control some hardware, not just run a Linux desktop or a media server.

blacksmith_tb 2y ago
We are starting to see SBCs that bake in an RP2040 to drive some GPIO pins (without needing to tie up a physical usb port), which seems like a reasonable compromise... I do like the RPi Zero size/perf/price combo, but for anything that needs more horsepower it's hard to argue with the bigger NUC-a-likes.
- teruakohatu 2y ago
  Yes there are N100 SBCs including a RP2040, so best of both worlds.
  - sthlmb 2y ago
    It’s not quite as seamless though, sadly, it’s just the same as having a Pico plugged in via USB but it’s a good step, even if the X4 (assuming that’s what we’re referring to) has some other flaws!
- nxobject 2y ago
  Especially when you want to work with PIO as well. Well, either way Raspberry Pi gets paid.
- qhwudbebd 2y ago
  Do these give you decent performance DMA-able gpio and spi like you get even on a cheap rpi4? (I'm not claiming they don't/can't, just that it isn't immediately obvious to me that they would.) For example, spi is an easy hack to bit sample a digital level and stream the results into memory for later processing. You can effortless do this at 20MHz+ plus on an rpi4. When you want to stream multiple digital levels simultaneously (in sync), DMA on gpio is a nice generalisation. (Could perhaps abuse I2S inputs too, which might be present on a more generic x86 board?) I always wonder about a nice PCIe board supporting good DMAable gpio/spi/i2c/etc on standard x86 machines. I'd probably pay a fair amount of money for a quality one. But it's a product I've never seen on the market. Bodging a USB gpio interfaces with one of the relatively low spec chipsets seem like a pale, inefficient and high-latency imitation. Actually, given the RP1, maybe the rpi5 has slow/non-DMA gpio too? I haven't been able to check it out yet as these boards still don't have mainlined linux support and I'm not up for buying toys that don't. (Am I imagining it, or did they used to be a lot better at mainlining support for their boards promptly?)

mardifoufs 2y ago

Wait, which raspberry pi are you talking about? Max performance on a rpi5 is closer to 20 watts technically, and a bit less than that usually because of thermals. But it's not 5 watts, at least nothing I've seen indicates that. The official rpi5 charger provides 5v5a, so 25 watts. And a lower power mode is used when a "standard" 15w charger is used.

Aurornis 2y ago

> Max performance is like ~15w to ~4w. Peak power from the Raspberry Pi 5 is 12W, according to Raspberry Pi themselves: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/ The N100 SBCs have a much higher peak power and heat, but it's also fine to let them throttle down. Really though, I think most hobbyists would be perfectly fine with a base model 2GB RAM Raspberry Pi and a cheap USB to NVME enclosure. It's not optimal, but it works and you're not spending money to hot-rod something that will never be all that fast anyway.