•  ohto   ( @ohto@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
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    579 months ago

    I want to be excited about this, but I just don’t believe I’ll actually be able to get one for retail price. For much of the RP4 lifecycle they prioritized corporate sales, and regular consumers were out of luck. I don’t have a lot of faith in them right now.

    • we’re going to ringfence all of the Raspberry Pi 5s we sell until at least the end of the year for single-unit sales to individuals, so you get the first bite of the cherry.

      • To keep alive the community that maintains the packages that businesses use? /s

        There are a few things you won’t forget and the last years were one of those events. Thankfully the competition made leaps forward regarding software support.

        Do you remember FTDI-gate 1 & 2 (approx. 1 decade ago)? I do and FTDI never made it back onto my BOM and probably never will again, at least until SiliconLabs, WCH, and Holtek screw it up.

    •  Tak   ( @Tak@lemmy.ml ) 
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      189 months ago

      It’s gotten to the point with Windows 11 killing so many thin clients for businesses with TPM that you can typically find used ones for nearly as much as a Pi. Unless you need the size and efficiency I just struggle to find reason to buy another Pi if I need to selfhost something.

      Pis are really cool but they really have become more corporate focused and it shows.

  • Realistically probably not getting one for less than $160CAD.

    At that point, might as well just buy a used Dell optiplex or something. These boards are absurdly priced, and you’ll never get it for MSRP.

    Even with the added power consumption of the Dell you’ll pull out ahead lol

      • Amazing for what exactly? I remember them being unreliable, slow af and not really good for much other than collecting dust.

        I mean sure the idea was cool, in principle, but they needed a serious upgrade in specs. Now they got it and everyone bitches bc it comes at a price?

          • Kiosks – my makerspace uses one for guest signin
          • Pihole – make your life less ad-infested without browser plugins
          • Octoprint – run your 3d printers
          • Home voice assistant without relying on a big company of any kind, or sending them sounds of you having sex

          The first models were rough on reliability, but they got a lot better around Model 2B and onward. SD cards with A1 or A2 rating help a lot.

          • I don’t need any of those things tho. Mostly what I need is decent IO throughput which was unnecessarily constrained on earlier pis by poor design choices. The pi4 is the first to really shine in that regard.

            I have a pi2 and I used it as a libreelec media center, and it was Ok in that capacity, but it’s far too slow to transfer larger files regardless of how you do it (all relies on a slow usb interface).

  • Priced at $60 for the 4GB variant, and $80 for its 8GB sibling (plus your local taxes), virtually every aspect of the platform has been upgraded, delivering a no-compromises user experience.

    Ehhhhhh, that’s pushing it. Didn’t the v4 and v3 cost in the $30-$40 range?

  • These things are great for !boinc@sopuli.xyz often time leagues more efficient per watt in terms of computation than regular PCs. I have a couple of 'em working on cancer research and computing to develop an open-source patent-free covid antiviral. You don’t need a PhD to make a difference, all you need is a processor :)

      • If they were more efficient per watt for scientific computing, you’d hear about researchers building HPC clusters from them.

        Efficiency per watt is not the same as total cost of ownership. Pis are expensive for the amount of compute you get from them in total, but the compute itself is efficient per watt. You would need at least a dozen Pis to rival the latest CPU processors in terms of total output, a dozen Pis is more expensive to buy than a single CPU.

    • I did a quick Google.
      https://web.eece.maine.edu/~vweaver/group/green_machines.html

      Is the best actual test data I can find. It uses a physical power meter, so it’s full system (not TDP or self reporting power consumption).
      And it’s a few years out of date.
      Seems like Apple silicon is the winner (and will probably continue to be).
      The Xeon that beats the rpi4 for GFLOPS/watt is an e5v3, which was launched in 2013 and EOL in 2021.
      So there will absolutely be some new Xeon CPUs that will perform better.

      However, for a $50 device, it’s probably the best GFLOPS/watt/$ from what little empirical data I can find

  • There’s a lot of people in this discussion taking about how raspberry Pi and the pi foundation isn’t worth your money, whether on principle, or just dollars per unit of compute.

    I get it, but I have a question. Is there a competing SBC that has official PoE support? I know there’s half baked ways to sort that out separate from the device, but I have a few edge cases where the last viable option was the pi 3B+. The official pi 4 case is horrendous for airflow, and third party cases usually either assume you want no protection (and all the airflow) or you want to handle thermals by contact pads passively (making it difficult or impossible to use the PoE hat), or are just as bad as the stock case for airflow, but they have enough room inside to add a hat, in which case, why go third party when the official case is equally terrible?

    The pi 3 had a PoE hat, and a case you could take the top off and get decent airflow. Too bad the fans in the first gen PoE hat are unicorns in terms of power draw, with no way to adjust the power curve for the fan connector to suit a different fan, and since they’re unicorns, you can’t find them for purchase, and if you find something remarkably similar, they’re still slightly different enough that they don’t work (I’ve tried). So the fans burn out and IDK, good fucking luck I guess. Buy a new PoE hat?

    Then there was the gen 2 PoE+ hat which released alongside the pi 4, which supposedly works with the 3 as well, which I haven’t tried yet, but I’m planning to.

    In every case, I have done network monitoring and service nodes that aren’t exactly local to a power receptacle and they need PoE. The pi 4 eliminated itself because of the garbage case design of the official case and the lack of thought by those doing the third party cases… so I’m looking at the 5 like, finally, they got it right.

    Now everyone is talking shit about the pi foundation, which I can completely understand, but for the application I need these for (and my pi 3’s have been in service for like ~5 years and probably need to be refreshed), what other option do I have? What’s decent with a good case and PoE input? PoE or PoE+ doesn’t matter, I just need to be able to package it up into a relatively small footprint for the application.

    Anyone have any suggestions? I’m all ears. I’ve googled till I’m blue in the face and I can’t even find an SBC that has an option for PoE, I never got to looking into whether it has a decent case or if it will run my software…