So SBCs are shit now? Anything I can do with my collection of Pis and old routers?

I dunno when it happened but I swear SBCs were the new best thing in the universe for a while and everyone was building cool little servers with their RockPis and OrangePis.

Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox with everyone shitting on Arm. What happened? What gives?

Is my small army of xPis pointless? What about my 2 Edge routers?

I’ve got about 6 xPis scattered round my flat - is there anything worth doing with them or should I just bin them?

All thoughts, feelings and information welcome. Thank you.

luna,
@luna@lemmy.catgirl.biz avatar

Sbcs are neat and raspi is still cool imo, i guess people just started to realise that mini x86s exist too and the recent releases with 6, 8, 12, cores are enticing to a group of people. Really depends on what you want to do, right tool for the right job etc

FutileRecipe, (edited )

I guess people just started to realise that mini x86s exist too

People always knew x86s existed. I think the main culprit is the price gap between them and Pis is decreasing. Pis used to be around $35, which has skyrocketed to 3-5x MSRP, plus they were unavailable for a long time. Now the Pi’s performance to price ratio isn’t justifiable to most, so people pay a little more for the x86 but get so much more capability.

qjkxbmwvz, (edited )

I love my orange pi (5+, 16GB, 256GB eMMC, 2TB NVME). New, with case and eMMC (excluding NVME) was about $200.

Smart switch says it idles at about 2.9W, transcoding 1080p with Jellyfin draws about 5W (at several hundred FPS with HW transcoding — so it presumably won’t draw that much for the entire duration of the media). Not sure how reliable smart switch is at those powers but I’m guessing it’s ballpark accurate.

Works flawlessly for Immich of course.

The duel 2.5G NICs are underutilized by me but kinda fun to have I guess.

For me, idle power is important, so the ARM SBC route is pretty appealing. A new x64 NUC at same price might offer comparable performance I suppose, and something used could be beefier at the expense of more power usage. But to each their own!

BCsven,

They are still good, arm is awesome. i have Pi4 as OpenMediaVault and docker/homeassistant, etc. Friend gave me a Pi2 surprisingly OMV6 installs on it (even though it ia technically not supported), that one became a PiHole. My 13 year old iomega arm NAS just got converted to a debian minidlna server. Uses 20% of the 256MB RAM.

node815,

I got lost with setting up a nice inbox downloader to store all my emails on a HDD attached to my RPI4, but haven’t quite mastered the SMTP server part or found the right software to run on it. It’s currently powered off waiting for a reflash of the SD Card so I can try again. The end goal for mine is to set up fetchmail and have it grab from my inboxes then imap capabilities so I can read it in Thunderbird. (Don’t talk to me about webmail, I know it’s the way but I’m older than Star Wars (Original one) and am stuck in my ways. Now get off of my lawn!

Seriously though, I have tinkered with it before as an AdguardHome Server, but somehow, my latency increased so I dropped that. Most of it’s life was spent hosting Home Assistant on it until I moved that to the umm…more controversial Proxmox VM method. I’m also on the fence about setting up the Raspberry Pi Nextcloud on it. (Maybe).

Here is a good resource for 36 different things you could possibly do with yours.

helenslunch, (edited )
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

SBC (specifically RPis) got more expensive. x86 got more powerful, more importantly more efficient, and cheaper. Also X86 has more software built for it than ARM.

There are a few X86 SBCs now though.

If you already have SBCs and they’re doing what you need, I see no reason to switch.

SnotFlickerman,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I’ve got about 6 xPis scattered round my flat - is there anything worth doing with them or should I just bin them?

Fuck, if you can’t figure out what to do with them, give them to me and I will! There’s so many fun art projects you can get up to with Pis.

spez_,

I say bin them. Throw them into the ocean

TrickDacy,
@TrickDacy@lemmy.world avatar

Username checks out

snekerpimp,

Jeff Geerling made the comparison in a video recently. Did not get to finish it yet, but he brought up pros and cons of both, and there are use cases for both ARM and x86. I still use mine even though I have an old dell tower as an x86 server, mainly for netboot.xyz and pivpn, because I can run it with poe. As long as the switch has power those services will be available.

altima_neo,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

The price is what happened. A pi 5 costs almost as much as an old used computer.

Toribor, (edited )
@Toribor@corndog.social avatar

This exactly. If you already have Pis they are still great. Back when they were $35 it was a pretty good value proposition with none of the power or space requirements of a full size x86 PC. But for $80-$100 it’s really only worth it if you actually need something small, or if you plan to actually use the gpio pins for a project.

If you’re just hosting software a several year old used desktop will outperform it significantly and cost about the same.

altima_neo,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

And then there’s still all the crap it needs to work, if you don’t already have it. Power supply, adapters, storage, case, hats, etc.

MalReynolds, (edited )
@MalReynolds@slrpnk.net avatar

less so with TCO considering the power budget…laptops however…

Toribor,
@Toribor@corndog.social avatar

True. I did some rough math when I needed to right-size a UPS for my home server rack and estimated that running a Pi4 for a year would cost me about $8 worth of electricity and that running an x86 desktop would cost me about $40. Not insignificant for sure if you’re not going to use the extra performance that an x86 PC can offer.

Linkerbaan,
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

The Pi 5 isn’t very power efficient. X86 CPU’s from a few years ago were already on a more efficient process node

MalReynolds,
@MalReynolds@lemmy.world avatar

You’re quite right about the Pi 5 power efficiency, an Alder Lake N100 / i3 will smoke it in ops / watt given the right board, but the context was ‘a several year old used desktop’ which the Pi will handily beat.

Linkerbaan, (edited )
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

Depends on what it’s doing. The Pi5 has lower idle power usage but if it’s under constant load it’s actually very inefficient. Keep in mind that the Pi5 has a 25W max TDP, almost as high as the N100.

The reason that the N100 is seems less efficient in Jeff’s video is because it’s clocked a lot higher. And power usage increases exponentially with higher clockspeeds

The Pi5 is made on the 28nm node, which is from around 2011. Of course it has other efficiency improvements like the GPU and the ARM architecture, but pound for pound I don’t think the Pi5 even beats a 6 year old desktop in efficiency if the desktop was properly downclocked and not running some inefficient HDD’s or the likes.

Rockchip boards on the other hand are made on 22nm, which is why they tend to be a bit more efficient.

empireOfLove2,
@empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

A lot of people, myself included, got pissed off at the Pi Foundation during the chip shortage for exclusively shipping boards to business customers who vacuumed up every single one of them faster than any consumer could. You couldn’t shake a stick at any Pi for less than 3x MSRP from scalpers, which at that point, you’re literally better off grabbing a NUC. They showed their true colors and it left a bad taste in all our mouths, and I will never be buying another Pi.

Really the ARM hate just comes down to ecosystem support. A lot of the SBC’s from other Chinese suppliers have mid kernel/OS level support at best, and a limited range of compiled software. For a lot of purposes, going x86 simplifies setup and opens up the software realm so, so much.

colt45,

Still got’em all. Pis are 3d printing, running small automation projects, running on solar in my back yard. I have far too many others that I took a hit on, honestly. Acme Arietta G25 is one that I’ve really only done some hardware dev on. I’ll prob be buried with it. I had a Pocket C.H.I.P that was sick, but after the company fell, I ditched it. Omega Onion 2 hasn’t seen any electrons since about. Two weeks after I received it. But yeah, five liters of fun…

notfromhere,

I have a small cluster of Pis running k3s kubernetes and running several services for my household. Yea they could all run on a single beefy server but I had fun learning it all.

Haha,

I bought a dozen of pi4 when they were so cheap but i actually dont know what exactly to do with them. I actually would love some ideas

taaz,

I had the same question few days back here

biglemmowski.win/post/546746

Haha,

I’m more lost reading this hahaha

PrettyLights,

The next pi I get will be turned into an MT32-Pi for use with my Mister retro setup and classic PC games.

github.com/dwhinham/mt32-pi

It can also be used as a midi synth if you’re into that

Haha,

Hell yeah! I had bought a front end called lunchbox a long time ago but i havent got to install moonlight streaming either :) for midis that’s an awesome idea too. Maybe one raspberry PI for all music stuff… thats one way to organise things too

tburkhol,

Pi 4’s were hard to get there for a while. Pi 5’s are expensive. Lot of other SBCs are also expensive, as in not all that much cheaper than a 2-3 generations old low-end x86. That makes them less attractive for special purpose computing, especially among people who have a lot of old hardware lying around.

Any desktop from the last decade can easily host multiple single-household computer services, and it’s easier to maintain just one box than a half dozen SBCs, with a half dozen power supplies, a half dozen network connections, etc. Selfhosters often have a ‘real’ computer running 24/7 for video transcoding or something, so hosting a bunch of minimal-use services on it doesn’t even increase the electric bill.

For me, the most interesting aspect of those SBCs was GPIO and access to raw sensor data. In the last few years, ‘smart home’ technology seems to have really exploded, to where many of the sensors I was interested in 10 years ago are now available with zigbee, bluetooth or even wifi connectivity, so you don’t need that GPIO anymore. There are still some specific control applications where, for me, Pi’s make sense, but I’m more likely to migrate towards Pi-0 than Pi-5.

SBCs were also an attractive solution for media/home theater displays, as clients for plex/jellyfin/mythtv servers, but modern smart-TVs seem mostly to have built-in clients for most of those. Personally, I’m still happy with kodi running on a pi-4 and a 15 year old dumb TV.

brygphilomena,

This is how I feel.

I would much rather have a single machine running vms which I can easily snapshot and back up rather than a dozen small machines I have to deal with power supplies and networking.

SBCs have specific use cases, usually where they need to interact with hardware. That’s what made the rpi so great with it’s GPIO and hats. But that’s a rather small use case.

BCsven,

I have pi4 with OpenMediaServer for SMB shares and videos to TV, it has docker and portainer add ins; so that single Pi has CUPS, Trillium Notes, PaperlessNG, homeassistant, kanboard, pdftk converter, syncthing. It could have more, I just ran out of applications I might need. no issues with performance.

BearOfaTime,

2 - 8 watts of power for a Pi vs 9-150watts for an x86 system. There are definitely use-cases.

I use a Pi for DHCP, DNS with PiHole, Tailscale Subnet Router, Rustdesk server, Vaultwarden, Syncthing (connects to local device shares, rather than run ST on each device), ArchiveBox, and working on instant messaging (maybe SimpleX, not sure yet). It’s kind of maxed out.

But all this runs under 8watts (actually it’s so low my smart switch doesn’t even register the consumption).

Linkerbaan,
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

New X86 processors are as efficient as the Apple M series. They are far more power efficient than a Pi under load, though they will consume slightly more at idle. But not nearly as much as you’re suggesting.

westyvw,

Uh, my server is an x86, is fanless and the cpu idles at 9 and maxes at 12. Is much faster then my pi and has quicksync.

I run plex, jellyfin, smb shares, mealie, tailscale and rerouting, notes, and books.

I like my pi but performance per watt isn’t as drastic with x86 if you build for it. Did I mention it’s also fanless? Passive heating that just works on the cpu.

BearOfaTime, (edited )

Nice!

Yea, I’ve been eyeing a box like that, looks like it could be useful.

Yep, it’s all tradeoffs, gotta know what you’re shooting for. My Pi cost $5, I’m using an old phone charger (I have many), and an old microsd. If anything fails, I just grab another from the junk box.

All I know with my current use-case is I can’t measure the power consumption with the tools I use. I imagine that means under 5w draw (not really sure what it’s capable of measuring).

MangoPenguin,
@MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox with everyone shitting on Arm. What happened? What gives?

It’s because the price point is really high now. There’s nothing wrong with the hardware you have.

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