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This is a loose reply to stacksmiths recent gemlog "goodbye Raspberry Pi" which you can find here:
gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~stack/gemlog/2022-05-27.pi.gmi
A particular sentence inspired me to share a personal anecdote:
Anyway, at this price one would be a fool to buy a Raspberry Pi, when you can pick up a used i7 box with 16GB of RAM and a sizeable SSD for just a little more. Or an ESP-32 which is still under $10.
I actually had to face this deliemma when it came time for my mom to upgrade her PC.
She had been using an old 2003 IBM thinkcentre workstation from the windows vista days that our local PC store had practically given to me for free. 2GB ram, duo pentium core. Depending on how much of a retro-computing enthusiast you are thats either a lot of processing power or very little. Luckily for her needs I was able to make it usable, if slightly slow to load things. Banking, email, and playing some then-flash now-html5 web browser games at pogo.com were done in a modern web browser on a 2003 machine. How?
Briefly want to sidetrack and tell you something. Computers were built different back then. I never experienced the craftsmanship that went into some of these older machines until the thinkcentre. 'The dinostation' is a IBM certifed 50 pound hunk of solid stainless steel. The case is the most solid and well-built of its kind that Ive personally handled. Its a bitch to lift and move but I could empty a round of shotgun shells into it with a high probability of survival. Modern computer cases are designed to be light and airy usually made aluminum which is nice to lift, but damn they just don't cases built that solid anymore.
I didn't know as much about desktop enviroments back then so first I made the bad decision of trying to load linux mint 20 cinnamon on it. As you might anticipate, that didn't end well. Way too laggy and unresponsive. XFCE probably would have worked abit better in hindsight. My next OS was Puppy Linux.
Puppy's main schtick is that it lives entirely within RAM. A very useful trick for old computers is to run stuff entirely within the much faster RAM memory compared to old sluggish hard-drive memory. With the help of puppy, the Dino-desktop got a fresh start as her main desktop for about a year and a half, until the CMOS battery in it died. At that point, she understandably wanted to spend some tax return money on a newer computer that would load her games and sites a little faster. As the tech-wiz of the family it was and still is my responsibility to pick and choose what would be best for her within a reasonable budget.
At the time, I was really interested in SBCs and the Pi in particular. The Pi 4 had just came out and it was touted as a viable desktop replacement. I searched on youtube something like "pi 4 vs desktop" and eventually stumbled upon a video by ETA Prime called comparing a kited out pi4 for 100$ and a used dell optiplex off ebay for 100$.
Performance wise, the Optiplex expectedly blew the pi-4 out of the water. An older gen i7 with 8 gigs of ram and 120v power supply still kicks the shit out of an ARM processor with 4-8gb running on 5VDC, and most likely will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
A more powerful machine requires, well, more power. Theres good reason to go for the device that offers much more computational bang for your buck. To most, its better to have the computational power when you need it than to need it and not have it.
Naturally, my mom got a nice used optiplex with more ram and processing power than she will ever need, complete with an SSD and LM20.2 Cinnamon. For 80$. She let me know right away that she could feel how much more responsive it was. and it is still serving her well, hopefully it will continue to do so for another 20!
Nowadays with prices of things inflated beyond belief, there is *very* little reason to want a much more underpowered and very costly SBC over a dirt-cheap used desktop or ;a[tp[. Theres only one area where Pis and SBCs in general stomp PC workstations: Energy efficency.
You see, for most people in first world countries (especially the IT/Hacker/Tinkerer types) power is a relatively cheap and accesable commodity. Killowatt/hours for pennies on the dollar. A device using a couple extra hundred watts a day is barely noticable in the electric bill.
I would like for these relatively well-off people to consider for a moment, those who live life-styles where power is not nearly as accesible, reliable, or cheap. Those who live in RVs/coverted vehicles, those who live off-grid in the middle of nowhere, those who live in 3rd world countries and/or small island nations with poorly established electric grids, if any at all.
If all you have to power your stuff is some batteries and a few solar cells or a little wind turbine, energy efficency starts to matter, like alot. Traditional computers are notoriously power hungry things when they want to be. But just how energy efficent are SBCs compared to a desktop or laptop? Lets get some solid numbers down by taking a look at this chart made by ExplainingComputers for his video "PC & SBC Power Consumption"
In the example "Ryzen 3 PC" Max idle was 39W while Max load went as high as 153W
Compare that to the laptop with only a max draw of 25W, more likely around 30-40W for slighly more powerful laptops. Then compare that, to the most powerful PI with a Max load wattage of 4W.
If all you need to do is some light net browsing, video editing, and movie watching, the PI series maximizes power efficency over performance and the result is a usable computer that runs on~ 5 volts. If that isn't almost like technological magic I dont know what is.
ATHY is a fellow gemini capsuleer I recently discovered and I really like their ideaologies and life stories. In relation to this article though, they did some testing with older thinkpads and found them to be more energy efficent than SBCs which is really wierd.
Through experimentation, I noticed the x200t used less power than any other computer I owned. In fact, The x200t uses less power than a Raspberry Pi 4 when its coupled with the external monitor and keyboard required to use it. The x200 and the x200t use an average of 16-20 watts during normal use. This means for a 24 hour period of constant use, the thinkpad needs about 400 watt hours. Or less than 1/3 the power a Macbook Pro requires. This is doable in an offgrid situation.
Check out their full post here:
How much do you *need* out of your computer? The answer to that question ranges from "Just Checking E-mails" to "My RAID cluster core stack basically does technological magic" and that says alot about a persons understanding and skill with technology. The more you want out of your system, the more complex and powerful it needs to be. Thats not an unreasonable statement to make, I think. Developers, graphics artist, digital content creators of all kinds require the power of modern desktops.
But if you dont need all that power, If all you want as a user is the basics, and as a developer all you want is a simple net server hosting text based files and maybe an image or two, SBC is a great choice in hardware. So many small-net sites run off SBCs just to list a few:
Sergio-101's capsule runs on Pi
Solar powered lowtechmagazine site running on Olimex SBC
100 Rabbits site running on Pi Pico
Light devices are meant for running light services.
Having proprietary blobs is a real problem, and is a bigger problem the more you are a fundemental privacy/FOSS idealist. Most technological things on the market are built with proprietary, closed source parts. Chipsets are a particularly scary thing because of Management Engines, most infamously intels IME system which is effectively a hardware-level black box which may or may not be a backdoor for government security agencies.
Open archetectures like RISC-V are starting to change the game, and there now exist SBCs with the RISC-V chip. Just keep in mind that RISC-V is in its early stages. It is now where ARM was a decade ago, so its best not to have too many expectations towards processing power. Still, its a promising feat of open-source technology.
Video explaining RISC_V by ExplainingComputers
VisionFive SBC powered by RISC_V archetecture
My point with this article is that... well... Yeah, there wasn't one. I just wanted to share my experience and some thoughts on PCs Pis power consumption and open archetecture. And now im done! Thanks for listening.
