Comment by ThrowawayR2
3 days ago
> "...: It sounds like the key feature will be 'more': a faster CPU and faster IO, rather than new features."
Raspberry Pi Holdings is a embedded systems manufacturer for pity's sake; we don't need more from them, we need less. [EDIT] A faster Raspberry Pi 6 is encroaching on the territory of the Intel N150 and its successors and mainstream Linux distributions and that is a battle they would lose in terms of price and performance.
Give us a Raspberry Pi Zero 3W with proper sleep states to reduce sleep power consumption, lower idle power while awake, and 1 GB of RAM even if it doubles the price.
^^^ when I tell people tangential to the field that the latest pi needs considerations of cooling solutions and a beefy power supply (no more just any old micro usb cable into any old usb port), they're astonished. It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python with a friendly Linux environment and is now an expensive, power hungry, hot computer with a microcontroller hanging off of it
I agree that Raspberry Pi is not a good general purpose computer, but some of these criticisms are starting to feel like a pile-on with partially incorrect information.
> the latest pi needs considerations of cooling solutions
FYI you can run the Raspberry Pi 5 without a fan or even a heatsink. It will safely throttle itself if it gets too hot.
If you're trying to get maximum performance out of it all the time, you will want a heatsink and fan. If you want to run some Python scripts in a Linux environment or even if you're doing heavy work and waiting longer is not a problem, you don't need extra cooling.
> and a beefy power supply (no more just any old micro usb cable into any old usb port)
This hasn't been true in 10 years.
Powering something off of any old USB port means it would have to fit within the 5V 500mA basic specification, which the Raspberry Pi 3 exceeded long ago.
> It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python
It was never a microcontroller by any definition of the word.
Raspberry Pi foundation has released microcontrollers that run MicroPython in a very user-friendly format https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/microcontrollers/m...
Raspberry Pi uses USB-C and USB-C is more generous with power. Almost everything except computers provides 15W. With USB-C, devices request want they and there is no reason has to work with minimum possible.
The problem with the Pi5 is that they use weird profile, 5A/5V, that requires special charger. Most 5V chargers are 100W and beefy. If they hadn't cheaped out on power circuits, they could have used normal 30W charger. They should come out with new version that fixes that.
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> Powering something off of any old USB port means it would have to fit within the 5V 500mA basic specification, which the Raspberry Pi 3 exceeded long ago.
Theoretically, devices like the iPhone have lower power consumption than that and loads of performance features like recording 4k 120fps video.
Of course, an iPhone costs much more than a RPi, and has much better economies of scale, so they’re not truly comparable.
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> > It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python
> It was never a microcontroller by any definition of the word.
I think the poster means people treat the R-Pi like an MCU that runs Python. The Arduino was popular at the time the Pi came out but limited. Once the Pi landed, it quickly filled the gap and the Arduino's popularity diminished to the point where it's now a corporate Pi clone.
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> Powering something off of any old USB port means it would have to fit within the 5V 500mA basic specification, which the Raspberry Pi 3 exceeded long ago.
In practice most USB wall warts will happily provide 2 amps or even more with no overcurrent protection at all. The 500 mA limitation, at least outside of ports on computers (where you'll maybe get a prompt on Windows and macOS), is theoretical.
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> FYI you can run the Raspberry Pi 5 without a fan or even a heatsink. It will safely throttle itself if it gets too hot.
What's the point of doing so though? If you're doing this, you're obviously using the wrong device. If all you need is to run some python scripts in a Linux environment, you should use a Pi 3 or Pi 0w2.
Agree with your other points.
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> It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python with a friendly Linux environment and is now an expensive, power hungry, hot computer with a microcontroller hanging off of it
The Pi project was never originally a microcontroller - it was always a full-blown SBC you could program any way you want with some GPIO pins attached. People literally used them as (slow) home computers.
The company didn't sell its first microcontroller until years later in 2021 with the Pico, by which point we already had Pi 4. I do though think its a real shame prices for the SBCs have risen as they have.
At one point, the raspberry pi was a decent option if you wanted something hobbyist friendly that could toggle GPIOs and connect to the Internet (and later Bluetooth).
I suspect Espressif has mostly taken over that market now
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It's still true that people, out of convenience and familiarity, used Raspberry Pi for tasks where a microcontrollers would have been perfectly adequate
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On the other hand, the RP2350 actually is a microcontroller, and IMO a nice one for many purposes. PIO, high-quality datasheet, nice ecosystem, etc. And the Pi Zero 2(W) can do most things the Pi/Pi 2 could, with a smaller footprint and less power consumption. Variety is nice.
And to the GP's point - the Pi Pico can be programmed in Micro Python.
The Pico is amazing and is by far the best thing they've ever done.
Something can't be a microcontroller if it runs Linux.
I wouldn't quite go that far. Linux runs on nommu systems. With some psram you should be able to get a version to run on at least the rp2350 using the riscv cores with relatively minimal fuss.
Is that a good idea? Well, not really.
You can run Linux on this
https://dmitry.gr/images/uARM_big.png
Bare metal or bare bootloader only right?
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Personally I have never seen Raspberry Pi as anything but a small personal computer. I've maintained a home server which get upgraded as Pi's upgrade. It runs well and manages my media, files and now running hermes agent. I remember even the first time it was introduced to me was with look it runs linux and you can probably run VLC on it.
Performance per Watt still outranks any other (quasi-)mainline linux device
Do you have a reference for this? Looking around, I see it being beaten by other ARM SBCs, and even low end Intel devices.
Many years ago, I measured performance per watt of the original Raspberry Pi when they were still relatively new. The performance per watt lagged behind even a beefy Intel box since the original Raspi was so slow that it destroyed any gain it got from using so little power.
EDIT: One set of benchmarks I found as an example: https://bret.dk/raspberry-pi-5-review/#Performance-Per-Watt
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Performance per watt is nice but I’d be more inclined to talk about “problems being solved per dollar.”
If you don’t specifically have a project where you need the GPIO pins built in, I struggle to understand the use case proposition of a raspberry pi compared to a typical x86 mini PC or even just grabbing a think client desktop like a ThinkCentre.
Almost everything that is unique to a Pi compared to an x86 mini PC seems like it makes more sense with an ESP device.
When the Raspberry Pi was $35 and it ran a desktop OS and the cheapest alternative that did that was 5x the price that use case made sense.
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A refresh for a Pi Zero with real sleep. lower power consumption and moving away from GPIO would be awesome. Stuff like a dedicated i2c connector, PoE support and display over USB-C.
M5Stack and other esp32 based ecosystems rule the world for MCU so the Zero just need to be linux SOC with all the fancy bells and whistles with good driver support
They'll do whatever they do.
Maybe a tick-tock release cycle (one with new features and some speed, the next with the ~same features and more speed) is where they're headed, and maybe that makes sense. They wouldn't be the first.
I'd love to see even-lower-RAM versions, though. Most of what I use Raspberry Pis for at home for is not RAM-hungry at all.
My Pi4 network router has 2GB because that was the smallest/cheapest version at release when I got it, but the system itself consistently only uses about 64MB of RAM. It'd do perfectly well and have a ton of breathing room with just 128MB of RAM (which will never happen, but if it did happen...).
I suspect the Pi4 that I use as a set-top box with Kodi would be fine with 512MB.
I've used Zero Ws for all kinds of things over the years and never felt RAM-starved with their little 512MB of RAM.
So I'm learning towards 512MB.
But sure: 1GB options would also be fine even if it does double the price. Our comments serve to demonstrate that there's room in the marketplace for different SKUs with different memory capacities. :)
We need a 5 lite. The specs of the 5 without the massive power draw and heat generation
At least now they literally cannot pull more power over USB 5V, because they maxed out the spec. It's even slightly beyond it.
Ideally each RPi generation should keep the same price (or lower now that it's gotten so high) but with better performance. If they can't do that they just shouldn't create a new generation.
Sure (inflation adjusted), but I see no harm if they also provide higher specced SBCs.
I don't think the Raspberry PI foundation has the buying power to control RAM prices.
The price was creeping up long before the DRAM shortage. They're totally doomed now.
> Raspberry Pi Zero 3W with proper sleep states to reduce sleep power consumption, lower idle power while awake, and 1 GB of RAM even if it doubles the price.
Yes, that would be kind of a dream device, perhaps also if it could suspend the os when asleep so it doesn't have to boot every time but I guess that might the standard way of doing it.
I'd be interested in seeing them partner with some of the other interesting and open-ish players, like Pine64 or Radxa, to push for a more standardised, unified SBC landscape.
But that's not as good for PR as "bigger, faster, better" even if that comes with the problems you mentioned.
I wonder how they are positioned now in the market.
During covid I wanted a small low power always on server. I thought about Raspi, but at the time it was expensive and I went with an intel nuc, for a similar price.
Now if I wanted to do hobby electronics, I heard I should look into esp32 or stm32..
I use a Pi 4B as a 24/7 home server in a country where domestic electricity is expensive (and worsening).
Each Pi release is more powerful, but uses more energy. I found the Pi 4B to be the sweet spot for me, because it is the earliest model to support USB booting, gigabit Ethernet, and offer > 1GB RAM.
Perhaps a used one would fit your purposes and budget?
I currently use it to run PiHole, serve media via SMB, host Postgres & Redis, and run some custom written Dockerized apps. Home Assistant to possibly follow, too. The current load seems reasonable in htop, but I haven’t looked into burst scenarios.
Well... "hobby electronics" is extraordinarily broad :)
It depends massively on what kind of DX you want. If you want to work with a 'regular' operating system, you're looking more in the RPi direction.
If you want to write straight-up C firmware, then yeah, the esp and stms are both great.
The things that keeps stopping me from using one for my server is the IO. the PCIe lane on the Pi 5 was a great addition, but it isn't quite sufficient.
Raspberry Pi isn't in direct competition with N150's.
Their niche is the industrial/embedded space. For that market, power consumption doesn't matter. What matters is that each model is guaranteed to be available till a specific date.
> Raspberry Pi isn't in direct competition with N150's.
They may not have intended to be in direct competition, but in the current crisis conditions they are priced about the same as equivalent RAM/storage N150s, have even worse supply issues than the N150s, and have worse performance/watt than the N150s.
Its mighty hard to recommend them for new projects at the moment (nor any of the Pi clones, which are also rocketing in cost and dwindling in availability)
Among the people making things like a DIY NAS, who want fast USB, lots of cores and RAM, small-ish, not-too-bad power consumption, running Linux; and not caring much about GPIOs or passive cooling, it’s in competition with the N150
Among people who want GPIOs and network connectivity, a low price and an open, microcontroller like experience, not caring much about USB speeds and lots of cores and running Linux and suchlike, it’s in competition with the esp8266 & esp32. And the previous generations of RPi.
The Pi SBCs are squeezed in between the SFFs and the microcontrollers for many use cases. It's only a good fit if there is a need for the GPIOs/Linux/Display. For anything else, there are better products out there.
It is for those of us that rather play around with an ARM CPU, and first class Linux support.
IMHO people expected a Pi that offered similar performance as a Mac M1 but with Linux as first class citizen
I mean, they're still on some ancient node like 28nm last time I checked.
I think exactly the opposite: we have no shortage of embedded crap we can buy; what is useful is dismembering intel. It would be better if the pi were risc v but this will do for now.
Is there some serious astroturfing going on with the N100/N150, or am I just jaded?
I have a bunch of old intel atom boards laying around. The Intel Compute Stick (TM) burnt out its flash root drive in a few months. The C2000 board I had burnt out the clock pin to drive the bios. I have a Clover Trail with a PowerVR GPU (I thought I was getting an intel GPU because it was branded Intel Graphics or similar, but nope!) that lost Windows support very quickly after launch, and has no GPU drivers for any other OS.
Instead of being fooled 4 times in a row, I looked into using an N150 for a NAS, but this time I held off a bit until after launch so I could research it first.
Lo-and-behold, they all have crazy PCIe / memory subsystem data corruption issues. I guess there are some chicken bits for the OS developers to set if the kernel can stay up long enough after boot without a panic.
Why would anyone buy this for a NAS / embedded use case?
> I looked into using an N150 for a NAS [...] Lo-and-behold, they all have crazy PCIe / memory subsystem data corruption issues.
Source? I've never had a single problem with PCIE on N100/N150/N200.
I have had a ton of issues with drive corruption on the pi, both via USB3 and PCIE.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.4-Lands-PCID-INVLPG
https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=48343.0
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I've been running an N100 for 3 years with a 5 bay external enclosure over USB 3.2 Gen 2 and ZFS, and have not had any issues. It is pretty phenomenal, pulls about the same power, and costs around the same as an RPi 5 but provides substantially more compute and throughput.
A Raspberry Pi with sleep and hibernation is like asking Valve to make Half Life 3. They just can't. It doesn't compute.
The entire raspi foundation is a marketing department. Raspi products is making zero sense ever since the Pi 2.
> encroaching on the territory of the Intel N150.
It’s nerdier to say you built your homelab on a Raspi, and that’s what keeps the foundation afloat.