6 ms·
Who needs 16GB ram on a PI! Like what are the actual use cases?
by JSTrading 2y ago
Who needs 16GB ram on a PI! Like what are the actual use cases?
- geerlingguy 2y agoI covered a few potential use cases in my blog post [1], but I'll list them here for brevity: 1. LLMs / AI: you can run llama2:13b on the Pi 5 natively, though at a pokey 1.4 t/s or so. Training small models for use with camera projects is easier too. 2. Web apps / consolidating containers: You could run a few 'beefy' websites off one Pi, as they're often memory constrained more than CPU-bound nowadays (my Drupal site requires 256 MB per PHP thread). (Though an N100 mini PC could be a better option if you care less about the energy efficiency). 3. Experimental gamers (probably like 1/10,000th the size of the other markets) who want to run modern AAA games with eGPUs on arm64... I'm one of like 10 people I've heard of who have attempted this lol 4. Clustering enthusiasts: usually we have more dollars than sense, and having arm64 nodes that cost $120 new with 16 GB of RAM per node means we can have more raw container or MPI capacity than with 8 GB nodes... [1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/who-would-buy-raspberry-pi-120 https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/who-would-buy-raspber...
- _joel 2y agoMore RAM for ZFS perhaps, Jeff?
- geerlingguy 2y agoHeh, indeed—that's my plan for the 16 GB Pi 5, to swap it out for the 32 TB all-SSD Pi NAS setup I've been running for the past year! https://github.com/geerlingguy/arm-nas https://github.com/geerlingguy/arm-nas
- magicalhippo 2y agoHowever you can get an N100-based box for about $150 (including shipping) with 16GB RAM and 500GB NVMe storage[1]. The N100 has a more powerful CPU[2], and can use OpenVINO which llama.cpp supports, so better token performance than the Pi. The N100 has far better storage performance due to x4 M.2 slot, and if you need even more RAM you can upgrade[3] it to 32GB. The RPi 5 was a very niche board to begin with, the 16GB option at $120 even more so IMO. [1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007511663921.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007511663921.html (semi-random example) [2]: https://bret.dk/raspberry-pi-5-review/#Raspberry-Pi-5-Benchmarks https://bret.dk/raspberry-pi-5-review/#Raspberry-Pi-5-Benchm... [3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/179c9m1/comment/k58n4wt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/179c9m1/comment/k5... (needs to be single module, not dual)
- PaulKeeble 2y agoIt also uses a lot more power all of the time for something that will be on 24/7. There is a trade off between these devices, the pi is more expensive to kit equivalent to the N100 machines (which are a bit quicker) but it uses less power all the time especially under load.
- magicalhippo 2y agoOf course if you're powering this off solar in some remote location then we're into the niches where an RPi 5 might make sense, but otherwise it's just down to electricity cost. How that works out in practice depends on workload though, while the N100 consumes more at idle, it can also finish workloads much faster so can potentially spend more time at idle. While the RPi 5 idles at around 4W (including a NVMe) and the N100 at around 15W, the RPi 5 uses 12W at full tilt[1], ie close to N100 idle power draw. Alternatively the N100 with 32GB of RAM can replace two or more RPi 5's in terms of performance, so in that regard might even come out ahead. [1]: https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/21#issuecomment-2579400396 https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/21#issueco...
- fy20 2y agoThe cost difference in power probably works out to much less than $50/year. Modern PCs are very power efficient when idle.
- addicted 2y ago$50/yr means you make up the entire cost of the RPi in a little more than 2 years if you’re running it as a home server of some sort, for example.
- PaulKeeble 2y agoBased on my current unit prices the difference in idle performance alone would come out to about £30 a year, so you would get the difference in price back within the life of the device. Europe has much higher KW/h prices for power especially in the past few years and is more advanced in transition to green power technologies and as such we tend to care more about the cost of power than those in the USA.
- moffkalast 2y agoI mean it's funny that people even have to ask, pretty much every piece of software treats RAM like it's free and unlimited nowadays. Even the most memory conscious cpp programs are so bloated at compile time that you need swap to even build them on <8GB boards. 16 GB is really a minimum for anything that's not embedded.
- computer23 2y agoJeff, Price is precisely linear, not polynomial! $5/GiB (price= $40 + $5 * xGiB) The graph isn't spaced correctly on the x axis, which causes confusion.
- denysvitali 2y agoIf you want cheaper (sort of) K8s nodes, with similar more compute power / RAM you can reuse old devices (smartphones, tablets) and run postmarketOS on them. Shameless plug: https://blog.denv.it/posts/pmos-k3s-cluster/ https://blog.denv.it/posts/pmos-k3s-cluster/
- eGQjxkKF6fif 2y agoBigger caches. Making entire RAMFS or tmpfs partitions (filesystems but in RAM) for applications or tinkering with things. https://wiki.debian.org/ramfs https://wiki.debian.org/ramfs , Virtualization / VMs, databases. Loading large files into RAM instead of having to read by row/column on a HD. I'd rather have more RAM available unused than not have RAM available and need it. Been the general rule of thumb for me for the last 30ish years.
- JeremyBarbosa 2y agoRAMFS is a genius idea. That solves most of the SD card health and speed issues without needing to get a whole hard drive. I know Puppy[0] and MX Linux[1] were made to run like that too. [0] https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/ https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/ [1] https://mxlinux.org/ https://mxlinux.org/
- unglaublich 2y agoYour kernel will already cache all IO in memory. You can decrease the to-disk syncing to e.g. once per day. ```sysctl.conf vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 86400000 ```
- JeremyBarbosa 2y agoGood point, but I was more talking about distros designed for a smooth day-to-day experience. A user would probably want something like SquashFS (to save space on the SD card) and ZRAM (to conserve RAM) since all their files would be living there.
- eGQjxkKF6fif 2y agoThanks for this information. That's actually really helpful for me to know in my server administration dealings. I _hate_ disk IO and disk thrash. I was aware of kernel stuff but completed eluded me that I could modify it. I put it to 7200
- alias_neo 2y agoI used to run a Pi as a Wireguard entrypoint to my home network, I made the filesystem read-only and created a RAM disk and moved logs and any other writes to it to protect the longevity of the uSD, it had the added benefit of security of a read-only FS. I'd remount it r/w occasionally and run updates. It ran flawlessly for years (at a time when I was killing a Sandisk uSD in Pis roughly once per week) until I decommissioned it.
- PaulKeeble 2y agoThe latest android phones are adopting 16GB now, so the SBC's for equivalent performance are going to do so too. One use of them is running android for development purposes among many many others. They make great self hosting servers that are really low power.
- slyfox125 2y agoOutside of a real use-case, RPi products are well-polished and fun to play with. There are few other products with an overall presentation - from design to marketing - that are as clean and well done. Personally, I enjoy supporting that.
- aa-jv 2y agoWith more memory available, the cross-compiling constraints become less relevant. Add one of these to your development environment, use it for building and packaging, deliver to the lower-spec memory devices being shipped. This can be a massive productivity boost.
- weberer 2y agoNow you can finally run basic Electron applications, like Slack. If you're lucky, you might even be able to run 2 at the same time!
- blueflow 2y agoRunning Chrome?
- TomK32 2y agoIt's just a bigger hammer, the only tool you will ever need in your life.
- squarefoot 2y agoI can't think of a single use case that wouldn't be served by a much faster MiniPC that after counting power supply, storage, box etc. would fall in a similar price ballpark. RPi and similar boards are a godsend when one needs easily accessible GPIOs without external interfaces adding points of failure and cost, but usually the amount of memory required in those contexts is much lower.
- rbanffy 2y agoThe bigger the system, the smaller the role of the CPU/GPU power consumption has in the overall sticker price. I would expect a 10TB-memory server with a couple hundred petabytes of flash storage to cost more or less the same regardless of what's the CPU inside it.
- teamonkey 2y agoI think it's mainly for embedding into products that require a standalone AI dataset of some sort. Robotics, perhaps, or production line defect detection.
- lakomen 2y agoK8s control plane node or even worker node. 4 get you a single cp and 3 workers which most helm charts require. There's a pi hosting provider which is reasonably cheap, like 7€/m, yearly payment, but only 100mbit connectivity. Still good enough for a learning cluster. Where can you get that for less than 28€/month?
- mekster 2y agoSeriously, these days, running a few dozen containers requires so much ram, I'm running a Odroid with 32GB ram and finally feeling safe from memory exhaustion.
- Tor3 2y ago>Who needs 16GB ram on a PI! Like what are the actual use cases? If you use it as you would a PC then it's actually not enough RAM. I have 16GB on my laptop and desktop computers both, and as I always keep browsers running they're always out of memory, even with 16GB swap added. Just came in to my office.. and my office computer with the same spec had killed all the desktop applications due to memory overuse, just as it always does when I leave it alone for a few days. Granted, I do have a lot of windows and tabs open, that's because I need to move away from stuff and do other things for a while, but when I go back I need it to be there just as I left it. But browsers are eating memory. All of them. Chromium, Firefox, Vivaldi.. you name it. For something working as a desktop PC I'm looking for way more RAM than a meagre 16GB. For a Pi which I use just for a single purpose I'm fine with those I have.. 2GB , 4GB, 8GB (which I use for different things). I'll never run a browser on any of them though. No way.
- paines 2y agoThe use cases get born once you have such amount of ram...
- n144q 2y agoWould it still make sense to use a raspberry pi over an x86 mini PC in those cases, economic and performance wise?
- diggan 2y agoOnly your use case can tell you if it makes sense :) If you're looking for a cheap in-house CI cluster for building/testing on ARM, it makes a ton of sense, just as an example.
- rollcat 2y agoIt's theoretically viable to run a 16TB ZFS NAS, which would be perfectly respectable for SoHo/homelab workloads. I've been looking to upgrade my aging PowerEdge T20 (also hate the fan noise), this is looking very interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if Jeff Geerling makes a video about this exact use case.