I think most of us moved on to x86 by now.
Price of ARM chips has gone up. Price of x86 has come down. x86 comes with a small energy penalty for a huge boost in speed. Also just a more versatile architecture, since most servers run x86.
I love ARM so much compared to x86, but speaking from a low-cost consumer server perspective, x86 is a great value, and it comes with a no compromises on software compatibility.
ARM boards are just a pain to use right now. There’s always some stupid quirk or driver problem and that’s if you even manage to find an up to date image for your chosen OS that works (because I can just about guarantee the ‘generic ARM’ one won’t). Feels like every few months someone announces something that’ll make all these problems go away yet here we are.
Don’t forget also the app support, a lot more apps support x86, than ARM.
The fact that X86 came after a full stop so his phone auto capitalised it.
I see I got confused as he capitalized the X in the middle of the first sentence as well and thought I had missed something
Could you install older windows systems on a single board x86? Like maybe xp? Or windows 7?
Because I don’t like Windows 10, and Windows 11 seems like a privacy nightmare.
As many have pointed out, price wise it’s not competitive. But more than that, the main feature of the Pi is its software support. I buy a Pi not because it’s got the top specs but because I know I can load a rock solid OS with security support and I won’t have to think about it. This is a problem for every Pi competitor.
You can get a Ryzen minipc for under $200 now.
For this price, just get an Intel NUC (one with like an i5 or better). They’re cheaper than this is on ebay.
They might not have 32GB of memory, but I’m honestly not sure why you’d need that much for a small PC like this.
I googled a cheap Intel NUC and saw power consumption numbers of 15w to 40w. Thats quite a bit of juice (and heat) for small applications.
Perhaps the newer models consume that much (under load), but the older ones are very power efficient - back in the day they ran Windows 8 and only consumed 4.6W @ idle (this is actually the same one I have, except I run HA on it which is probably much more power efficient than Windows 8 would be).
Realistically, for something like this, you probably don’t want to exclusively use the full load numbers to calculate power consumption, rather you want to use the idle+load numbers for your specific use case. Home Assistant barely uses any power even over time (I unfortunately misplaced my kill-a-watt or I’d measure it for you), and the NUC barely feels warm.
Nonetheless, you can disable a bunch of the GPU stuff in the BIOS if you’re concerned about power consumption. The article I linked above explains the settings a bit. These were meant to be the middle ground between a thin client and full PC, so it wouldn’t be surprising if their maximum wattage & TDP was much higher than a Pi; but that doesn’t necessarily mean a higher power bill or more heat.
Lastly, I mostly meant that this would be a good alternative to the device in the article, which would need a beefier power supply than the NUC. This shop listing says that its TDP is 60W, so just looking at raw numbers the NUC runs much cooler.
There’s other RK3588 boards in the $60-$70 range (notably Orange Pi 5). What makes this one different?
