[eamonnsullivan]

So, I saw this link and immediately thought, "I bet the discussion will be about how we should use N100s, instead." I wasn't disappointed. Even on dedicated Pi forums, you see that happening.

I guess I understand this point of view if you were trying to use Pis to experiment with Kubernetes or something. You'd have built your own (desktop) PC or a personal server rack for that kind of thing, years ago. But for the vast majority of typical uses (Home Assistant, VPNs, etc.) a Pi is going to be way more than you need. It will sit there and silently and reliably run, for years at a time, powered by a USB cable. I know mine have.

Why would I consider replacing those with a bigger box, fan noise and a power brick? Maybe I'm missing something?

[placardloop]

I think the reality is that a lot of people don’t use or care for the main Pi features like the GPIO pins or camera connectors, and aren’t using them in places where space or power is constrained. They’re purely looking for a cheap amount of compute.

For those use cases, it makes sense that performance per dollar is the top metric that many people look for. Pi used to be king there too, but as Pi prices have gone up and the price of other cheap compute has come down, it’s harder to justify the Pi. The Pi is still a great board, but a Pi5 with case, power supply, SD card will run you $100+ (throw in an SSD and you’re at $200+ easy), meanwhile an N100 PC can be had for the same price.

[elcomet]

I'm wondering why there isn't a cheapest alternative to the pi without those features that most find useless. Or a more powerful for the same price

[zamadatix]

N100 are often no fan and the power brick need not be much different than the one that feeds the Pi. At the end of the day the max wattages aren't much different.

The biggest thing the Pi line gets you is good GPIO and premade hats using it (with prepackaged OS images). If you're just running standard software like a home assistant or VPN then it doesn't make much sense. Doubly so on articles about OCing it.

[teamonkey]

I think a lot of people on the internet try to use the Pi as a home media server or file store and can’t envision it being used for anything else.

It’s versatile but really it has always sucked at those things. Yes, get a used N100 if that’s your goal.

The Pi shines in education and as an embedded device where power, size and maintainability are important. I spotted one the other day in one of those presses that crush pennies as a souvenir. It displayed an instructional video on a screen and also seemed to control the card reader device on the front. Why would you use a N100 in that context?

[zamadatix]

The Pi Zero 2W and Pi Pico make a ton of sense for those kinds of use cases. The Pi 5 (and 3/4) try too hard to be a PC to just fall short anyways.

[bhouston]

The mini underpowered PC market appears to be the only new market Intel is winning these days.

[ThatMedicIsASpy]

And they sold NUCs to ASUS. For mini PC servers I would always go intel for QVS transcoding. AMD is not on the same level as Intels media engine.

Intels iGPUs also support SR-IOV these days so you can get GPU acceleration to multiple VMs.

Streaming (local network - Sunshine/Moonlight) these days is really good. So good I consider moving my gaming machine to the garage and just stream it to a thin client or steam deck.

[michaelt]

> But for the vast majority of typical uses (Home Assistant, VPNs, etc.) a Pi is going to be way more than you need.

Ah, but if a Pi is more than you need,

you wouldn't be reading an article about boosting performance with SDRAM tuning

or indeed caring about the RPi 5 when the RPi 3 was more than good enough.