Yeah, the intel n100 is absolutely fantastic. but even at bargain basement price its at least 2-4x the price:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/TRIGKEY-Mini-PC-Desktop-Computer/dp...

I have the above, it's max powerdraw is <5 watts, even at 50% cpu its <3watts. That comes with ram, SSD, case and motherboard. so to get the pi5 to the same state would need an SD card (boo hiss poor speed.)

From what I've seen the pi5 is 1/3rd faster than the intel j5005. (in pybench at least.)

but comparing to a real intel NUC, of course its going to be faster, the NUC costs an entire order of magnitude more.

I bought an N100 for 160 USD including an SSD off of AliExpress. Thats 2x the cost of an rpi4. I benchmarked it and cpu perf is roughly 2x the rpi however i/o was easily 10x without any sdcard or USB shenanigans. Bonus because it's an Intel chip I can use the regular x86-64 os builds instead of some goofy fork. That's very compelling if you don't need a gpio or any of the raspberry pi accessories for your use case.

I don't know how the N95 and N100 compare, but I picked up a Beelink mini PC with an N95, 16GB RAM and 500 GB NVME for $195 on a sale the other day.

The Pi 5 looks to be $112.

By the time I buy a PSU, SD card, case, RTC battery, etc, I'm definitely not saving money buying a Pi.

Disclaimer: Canadian dollars.

I picked up a Beelink because the Raspberry Pi 4 was unavailable. I use it as a Linux desktop (next to my M1 Air) and a Jellyfin media server. It has replaced the Raspberry Pi for some purposes, but the Pi still has a place when hacking on hardware due to the GPIO.

The SD is the worst for reliability, but if it's like rpi4, you can put UEFI on the SPI flash and come up on non-SD boot devices without SD now.

But that's all kind of crazy when cheaper, faster SBCs commonly simply boot to reliable, on-board, eMMC.

Yeah, still happy I went with the Odroid M1 for a small home media server. It’s not fast, but it does everything I need out of the box, has a very nice aluminum case, and doesn’t use much power.

eMMC isn't that reliable. It's basically an SD card on a chip.

Difference is they're more optimised for random writes than large files like most SD cards, but you can get such SD cards too ("High Endurance" models)

When was the last time the eMMC on your phone failed? They are very reliable.

I have had several SDs fail sooner or later since rpi1 though which is why I personally won't be using them any further.

NUCs cost hundreds of dollars, though. And they are probably 8x bigger, if you start stacking Pis.

Rasperry Pi board easily cost hundreds of dollars, too, once the scalpers have bought up the little stock that is there.

I've only ever paid RRP and I strongly suggest you do to. Better yet, there are plenty of Pi 4 to purchase these days.

yes, these days. let's have a look at the last three years and see how it was then...

Why is that interesting? Are we expecting another global semiconductor supply chain problem?

Because people who _needed_ to buy a Raspberry Pi simply weren't able to do so.

Exactly the same as every other hardware supplier. For pi there was some kind of scheme for businesses who _actually_ needed the hardware in order to stay in business. No idea how that worked.

Either way, this is all history. Raspberry Pi boards do not cost hundreds of dollars as claimed.

psst https://rpilocator.com/

not much of use for the last three years.

This was used exactly for the last three years so you could get an alert when it became available.

Before that there was no need for a locator, just buy from whatever eshop, everyone had it in stock and at MSRP.

I am so grateful to the folks behind that site. It's the only reason I was able to track down units when I needed to buy them.

you not checking the site != people not being able to buy them

I'm not saying that it was easy, or anything like business as usual. They've done interviews where they talked about the difficult decision to prioritize companies that would go under without new stock over casual hobbyists. It's one of those unenviable situations where there's no good outcome, just a possibly less-bad one.

That site is one reason why I was able to buy Pis at list price these last three years.

Only if you are looking for a latest-gen or last gen machine. You can find some old NUCs for cheap, and there are lots of mini PCs or thin clients for around ~100. Yes about twice as expensive but more than twice as powerful (in both processor speed and features). Of course only if you plan to use it as a Linux computer, not for GPIO stuff.

This isn't super-practical for a commercial application which requires 70 identical machines.

Not only are they expensive and relatively large, machines that have had previous owners often have mystery issues which make them great for home tinkering projects, less so for something that can get you in trouble if it breaks down.

There's a reason companies buy new parts instead of employing teams to scour Craigslist for deals.

I hadn’t heard of these N100 systems before, but in a minute’s worth of searching I found this:

https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-Intel-N100-Computer-Desktop-D...

Faster processor, 16GB RAM, 500GB NVME SSD, with case. $165! That’s damn impressive, considering the RPi5 with 8GB RAM is suggested to sell for $80 (good luck getting it for that little). And Amazon can get it to me in two days.

Yeah it’s definitely bigger, but I wasn’t expecting these systems to be so cheap.

Yes, if I look at those new Intel N100 based mini PCs with a 15W TDP and their power / price / consumption ratio it would seems Intel took notice of the threat and reacted accordingly.

Especially now that the RPI kind of need a fan and you need to buy the power supply, the storage and the case. Well the RPI has GPIO but for small home server use case nobody cares...

>Well the RPI has GPIO

GPIO can be added via tons of USB to GPIO boards out there.

But I agree - lot of people tend to buy the Raspberry Pis for home servers instead of just opting for used mini-PCs from secondary markets. Even a 7-8 year old Intel CPU in those mini PCs will vastly outperform a Raspberry pi. Even the Raspberry 5. Plus, better I/O options and storage with mini PC.

> GPIO can be added via tons of USB to GPIO boards out there.

Depends on the use case. USB adds a few orders of magnitude more latency and jitter versus what's probably just APB.

Which only matters in very niche usecases though.

Most of the stuff just flashes LEDs or reads a switch. Doesn't matter for that. And for more intelligent stuff there's i2c or api which have their own interface boards.

The NUC's GPIO header: crickets

There was at least one NUC with a full GPIO header set. The DE3815TYKHE. I've done motor control, I2C and sensor IO with it and it was rock solid on that little NUC.

There was also the UP Board which was an Atom SOC with PI compatible GPIO. I believe that's still in production?!

Oh wow that's the first I'm seeing that, looks like it's still available though a bit pricey for over 1 GB of memory.

https://up-shop.org/up-board-series.html

Then again that is severely dated, the Atom was a very capable processor... when it launched, almost a decade ago.

Wow, I never knew they had x86 boards like this. The fact that its x86 is a huge deal itself in itself, due to more software/distro compatibility.

If you want the GPIO, that's a good reason to go Pi. Nothing equal to the software support inside the raspberry pi eco system for it's embedded controls.

If you want a small PC for media/homelab server/cheap desktop, they don't make any real sense anymore.

That's a easy problem to solve - https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264

There are other cheaper boards for USB to GPIO out here as well.

It solves it, as much as adding a trailer to your sports car solves your problem of not having a pickup truck. It works, but it's very inconvenient.

Eventually those boards run into limitations and then you have to just opt to go with serial to a microcontroller which misses the entire point of having a SBC.

I agree that its not the ideal solution. Still would be better to use a SBC like the Raspberry Pi or other boards. But was just pointing out that if GPIO needed to interface with slower hardware like relay boards or sensors , then there is an option.

That’s not suppressing since the Pi is usually several process node generations behind.