Why are 11 people flagging this as spam? Just because it’s about a commercial product? It’s difficult to produce hardware without charging money for it, since it’s, y’know, a physical object that someone has to build. At least the RPi is open-source hardware.
Specifically, the bootloader is proprietary/secret, as in, you cannot build a customized version yourself. I was actually bitten by this: I wanted to PXE-boot a largish initrd (entire root fs, I think it was 600M compressed) but the bootloader had a lower limit of how much it could download. I asked the PI folks to increase the limit but they refused (probably they had their reasons). So it was a no go. And a 16G PI would be a natural fit for running an in-memory OS.
Try iPXE? There’s a build for the pi here : https://github.com/ipxe/pipxe
Then you boot a small (~4MB or so when I’ve used it on x86_64) image via PXE and then use iPXE to pull the rest down via PXE or http(s) (or probably other methods, I’ve not looked beyond those).
Yes, I was thinking of chain booting but decided not to bother (8G was still too tight but might be worth the hassle for 16G). But I didn’t know about the iPXE build for Pi, thanks for the pointer!
It is but the underlying OS is now FOSS. This does not mean that the Pi firmware is FOSS – it isn’t – but it does mean that the code is there to study.
Guessing people parsed “for sale” in the title and flagged it on that basis alone. I wasn’t one of them, but I note that it’s consistent with how Lobsters treats most other product-release links.
I think spam (“for links that promote a commercial service”) is more applicable than off-topic (“for stories that are not about computing”), but I honestly can see both applying. The reason is this has very little technical detail. The article spends about 3/4 of the words talking about the company’s climate change policy and 1/4 talking about the newly released product. Basically only one (smaller) paragraph gets into any technical specifics about what makes this board different from others.
I’m happy to see a new Raspberry Pi model get released, I’m glad the company is considering how to take care of the Earth, but it certainly seems intended simply to sell the new Raspberry Pi, hence promoting a commercial service and I don’t see how it fits this criteria:
“Will this improve the reader’s next program? Will it deepen their understanding of their last program? Will it be more interesting in five or ten years?”
So why haven’t I flagged? As of my writing this comment, my flag would be the balance between positive and neutral votes on the article (+15, 14 flags). This article isn’t so egregious as to make me want to be That Guy and flag it down. Others that feel differently may vote their conscious.
Indeed the selling point of several Pi rivals is that they are open hardware.
The Pi is entirely closed and not very standards-compliant. It uses closed-source firmware based on ThreadX, and has a unique design and startup sequence: the VideoCore GPU is the primary processor and it loads code into the Arm. Thus the Pis can’t even run a normal Arm bootloader without work, and there is nothing resembling UEFI on them.
Some distros, such as openSUSE on Pi, start by softloading Das U-Boot as a more standard bootloader, and then load the OS from this, just to get the hardware into something closer to a more standards-based Arm computer before loading Linux.
The GPU boots the computer, loads the Arm code image from SD or wherever, places is it RAM, initalises the Arm core(s) and sets them running what it put in RAM.
If you want, you are perfectly free to put a UEFI loader in that RAM – but don’t kid yourself: it’s no more in control of the computer than the passenger in the front seat of a self-driving train.
The Picos and RP2040 and RP2350 are thoroughly documented but they don’t go as far as being open source. Last time I looked, the Pico board designs are not published, though the reference designs (for the PCB design guide documentation) are available. Some parts of the chip are published, such as the firmware source and the RISC-V cores, but other parts developed by Raspberry Pi Ltd such as the PIO cores are not published. (And of course most of the big IP blocks such as the ARM cores and USB controller are proprietary to other companies.)
Yeah I guess the original title (“16GB Raspberry Pi on sale now at $120”) could be interpreted as being a sale as in promotion, versus just the release announcement which happens to mention the price in the title. Didn’t even think about the confusing wording when I posted this, I just re-used the original title, but I can see how someone could think it’s off-topic.
IMHO more off-topic than spam, but either way its a product announcement for a minor variant of an existing product, hard for something like that to be on-topic (vs new generations where one often can argue that something fundamental enough has changed that it maybe deserves attention. But even then there are limits)
I haven’t tracked a lot of hardware in this class, but the overall price with the doubled RAM seems noteworthy?
I fondly remember rescuing one of the older models from e-waste and turning it into a more “persistent” alarm clock. I know a colleague that runs a whole rack of Pis for various hobbies. I do figure you’re likely more to get storage I/O bound than RAM bound first, but they still fill an interesting niche for a cheap, “beginner” device.
I do figure you’re likely more to get storage I/O bound than RAM bound first
That may still be true… but these model 5’s are a big improvement in IO throughput compared to previous ones, including first class support for an m.2 nvme daughterboard. It’s a huge step up from the days of doing everything on a microsd card.
Because it’s an ad for a single board computer. In what way is it relevant to lobste.rs? I’d not like it if lobste.rs to be a feed on any kind of ordinary computers.
With “any kind of ordinary computer” I mean that it’s not some world first implementation that is also being discussed.
On top of that the article is not just regarding an ordinary computer it’s also just an ad. There’s nothing setting it apart in content from most other ads out there.
Mods have since improved the title, but two reasons. (1) “X on sale for $Y” is always functionally an ad, even though it’s a plain statement of fact, since its function is to encourage the reader to weigh up buying one - IMO Lobsters don’t need that in their feeds; (2) the article itself has scant technical content to discuss, leading me to the conclusion that the main point of this submission is “hey maybe you want to buy this thing”. To me that’s spam regardless of whether the submitter benefits or not.
Look, I’ve been around since the 1991 green-card-lottery spam on Usenet that coined the term, and what you’re describing is not what “spam” means. This was posted one time by an active member, for informational purposes. You can dislike this sort of post for whatever reason, but use more accurate wording.
The Lobste.rs about page notes how it is defined in this community, which is different from how it was originally used.
For stories, these are: “Off-topic” for stories that are not about computing; … “Spam” for links that promote a commercial service.
In this case, spam simply means this article is by a commercial entity attempting to sell one of its products, with very little technical benefit. Not that people believe the article is trying to sell us pills or a new stock market scheme.
The original Raspberry Pi Model B with 256MiB of RAM cost $35 dollars in 2012. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $48. Today, the Raspberry Pi 5 with 2GiB costs $50. You can also buy a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with 1GiB of RAM for $35, which in 2012 dollars would’ve been $25.
So, exact same cost, or cheaper, vastly more capable at things the original really couldn’t do that all (like be a desktop) while still being just as good as what it was originally designed for.
Do I think you should buy one? Honestly probably not. 98% of people don’t use the GPIO, and if all you need is a low power server, N100 based products have you covered. But really, RPis haven’t gotten super expensive or drifted from their original purpose much at all, other products have just gotten better and cheaper at the main stuff tech professionals and tech hobbyists have used RPis for.
Myself and basically everyone I know who has one has it because it’s a linux box with GPIO/I2C/SPI. That’s what it’s for. Maybe my social circle is abnormally hardware focused, but 98% is a pretty decisive figure. I wonder if there’s some way to actually through like raspbian popcon or something
Maybe my social circle is abnormally hardware focused,
I think it must be.
I have at least half a dozen Pis and have used them for 12-13 years. I have never used the GPIO for anything and would be happy with a model without one. Talking to others, most people I know don’t use them either.
98% is certainly a number I pulled from my ass, but I don’t know anyone who uses the GPIOs, they all use RPis as low power servers. When RPis got scarce from the pandemic supply shock, almost all discussion online that I saw about what to buy instead centered around MiniPCs that don’t have GPIO. Occasionally I’d see someone point out that they didn’t work as RPi replacement due to the lack of GPIO, but most people didn’t seem to care.
Oops, I accidentally a word, was meant to be “some way to actually check…”
popcon is the Debian project that measures package usage: https://popcon.debian.org/, raspbian is the (i think official?) raspi distro, based on Debian. If using GPIO required installing some package, and raspbian had some equivalent of popcon (idr if it does), it’d be possible to tell roughly how many people use it.
So I’m assuming the question is something like “Is there an equivalent for Raspbian that could deliver useful statistics about people using software that uses GPIOs”. My guess is that the answer is no, because people would more often download such software outside package manager, write their own using libraries obtained elsewhere, …
Yeah, I think this is the reason to get one though. So I have one of the old raspberry pi 2s that I did get for $35 many years ago, and it is in some ways disappointing - it is sitting in a junk box that I almost never use, since it is fairly disappointing as a general purpose computer, not even especially good as an X terminal! (which is why I’m both interested and disappointed in this thing - the new ones might be better computers, but once the price goes up, it has to compete with everything else for that space.)
But it has been useful to me for two things: one is just experimenting with the GPIO pins. Never made anything useful for myself with it…. but knowing how they worked transferred well to work when a client said they have this other ARM device with GPIO pins and also had these lights and buzzers they wanted programmed on it in their business… like that’s not that hard and i could have probably figured it out on the job and stayed on schedule anyway, but having that preexisting experience made it a simple task to do what they wanted to do. So the education aspect worked for me, not lifechanging or anything, but some value.
The other thing I did with that was make a little noise maker and sound monitor for the baby’s room, a small program on a mini computer tucked away on a shelf. Of course, you can buy that kind of thing commercially for cheap anyway, and tons of things can do audio so that’s not unique like gpio (kinda) is, but still, recycling this thing I already had to do the job was kinda cool.
So I feel it was worth the $35, even if it is sitting in a box of random junk right now. Higher price point though feels different, though you do make a fair point they actually do provide a similar thing after inflation nowadays. Oh well, probably not worth getting another one anyway, even if a stronger machine, i don’t actually need it for anything.
EDIT: I am trying to clarify this. RiscOS is not a Linux, not a Unix, not even in the entire family tree of C-based OSes; it is considerably more different from any C-based OS than Windows is different from Unix.
But RO is a multitasking GUI OS that can handle IPv6, USB and so on, with a choice of languages, editors, and apps, and it runs well on a decade-old Pi with 256 or 512MB RAM. It was originally built for an 8MHz ARM2 with 512 kB of RAM, although this is clearly not that version.
With my journo hat on, talking to RasPi users, my impression – and I am still amazed by it – is that most people never replace the default OS. They should. There are smaller Linuxes for it than Rasbian (e.g. Alpine), and multiple non-Linux options. The Pi can run more different OSes than any other ARM SBC.
Very much so. It’s FOSS now, it runs on Pi models up to the Pi 4 and 400 (plus various other Arm SBCs), and in the latest release it gained support for the Pi’s built-in wifi chip.
That’s amazing. I thought that was all long dead. I have happy memories of the Archimedes (including many hours playing Lander but I’m pretty sure I did some more productive activities too…)
It’s strange to think that I was using a beautiful graphical desktop operating system in the ’90s, only to then spend most of my professional career in the 21st century using a VT100 emulator.
so tbh I didn’t know there still was a $35 model. Every ad I’ve seen for the raspberry pi since covid was like $80 or more, including this one here, hence my original comment. But I’m glad to be corrected that they still offer one!
I bought an $80 pi + case + charger + micdrosd + weird hmdi cable, never used the GPIO but I use it as a little home server for things like pihole, and it’s so good for that. The problem is you basically jump up 3-5x the price once you start looking at the next class of hardware like the Intel NUC’s and such. So even in this $100-150 range it’s still pretty amazing.
Edit: Looks like Intels N100 is probably a good middleground between the two these days.
right, that’s the thing, it’s not 3x with those. a cheap N100 mini PC including an SSD can be <$200 too. (I run a Pi I had myself still for such things, but the more expensive RPis are not the “no-brainer, almost no alternative” choice anymore)
I fondly remember using the original B+ as a desktop in 2012. Actually laptop. It was fine for editing and programming, but scrolling in Firefox was unusably laggy. I had to use my phone to read documentation. You can blame people like me for wanting SBCs with more and more ram ever since.
What’s wrong with a considerably expensier SBC from a competitor then? Simple: Only RPi has had graphics drivers, let alone HDMI compatibility to speak of. I could give one honorable mention of the Nitrogen6x, which you could buy with a working portable screen. But here we are over a decade later, and RPi has not really had any competition for all that it is.
Probably others I haven’t tried, but my experence of the first decade after RPi is that the competition is catching up very slowly.
The competition, as in other Arm SBCs, heavily agreed. They all seem to have a lot of drawbacks compared to Raspberry Pis. But the competition, as in x86 mini PCs? I think they’re basically on par or strictly better for many use cases. Faster GPUs, faster CPUs, more IO, not quite as low power but still pretty low power, and basically the same price as the RPi models with more RAM, if you need to buy a power supply and case for your RPi. And that price might include decent enough SSD storage too!
I’m looking into Intel N-series CPUs now, but it seems like the N100 and N200 only have default clock speeds at 100MHz vs RPI5’s 2.4GHz, and the Pi5 seems like it consumes about half the idle power. At a glance, the most compelling thing about the N-series chips is the hardware transcoding, assuming it Just Works. I mostly just use my RPIs for home server type workloads; I care about power consumption but not GPIO–should I be looking at N-series computers for these kinds of workloads? Why/not?
Also why is this post hidden/marked as spam? This seems eminently interesting and on topic for this forum?
an N100 has not a “default clock” (whatever that exactly means) of 100Mhz either. (And given its an entirely different CPU, comparing clock speeds as raw numbers is pretty pointless anyways)
see other comments: it fairly sure doesn’t, at least not in actual products, and either way focusing on idle clock speed is telling you nothing about performance.
Everything I’ve found on the Internet suggests the N100 has a clock speed of 100MHz. For example. I may be ignorant, but I have a hard time imagining a processor operating at 100MHz (i.e., not TurboBoosting) is going to outperform another operating at 2.4GHz even if they are different chips.
You’re misunderstanding something. There is no such thing as a “default clock”; all processors, both the N100 and the RPi’s BCM2712 included, do not have a fixed clock. The clock speed of the CPU will vary with the workload it is subjected to, so both the N100 and the RPi will clock down as low as they can when idle; this is the 100MHz you’re seeing for the N100. Both CPUs will also clock up with workload; the N100 can clock all the way up to 3.4 GHz on one core while the BCM2712 can to 2.4 GHz. In realistic use cases the N100 isn’t sitting at 100MHz, ever. I can guarantee you my N100 mini PC would be good for nothing if that were the case.
Either way, as the GP says, clock speeds don’t matter for much. You don’t care about what the clock speed is, you care about how fast the CPU can get things done or for how much power. You can compare online benchmarks for that: here’s a comparison on Geekbench of an N100 PC and the Rpi5, the N100 is about 40% faster for a lower TDP. Better yet, get both and measure your workload. Personally, I’d say there’s no reason to get an RPi5 over an N100 unless you need the GPIO.
(I’m fairly sure the “100Mhz” number is just people scraping Intels product database and using a stupid default because there is no number in there for whatever reasons. Looking at a few more useful results shows 800Mhz set on actual products using it, which makes more sense. Or maybe it can indeed be set to go down to 100Mhz theoretically, it’s not entirely impossible)
If it has work to do, it’s not running at base frequency. The same way the RPi5 will not be running at its base frequency of (if a quick search is to be trusted) 1.2/1.4 Ghz when it has work to do, but rather speed up. In both cases, the actual frequency under long-term load will depend on the power envelope set (I’m assuming with the N100 that’ll almost always be 6W) and if the cooling system can match that, for N100 miniPCs I’m seeing numbers of 2.9 GHz quoted for all cores being under load. With modern chips, the frequency they run when they got nothing/almost nothing to do is almost meaningless. So even if we ignore that its two entirely different architectures, you should be looking at measured performance instead the entire time.
All Raspberry Pi models (except Raspberry Pi 2 B+) are still available without deprecation notice. You don’t need a Pi 5 with 16GB, the most expensive one: you can choose whatever fits you best
I’m a big fan of the original “cheap Linux SBC” concept pioneered by the Raspberry Pi. I used to buy every new Pi as soon as they were released because there was nothing else with the same level of support, community, and value. But honestly, these days the Chinese N100 mini boxes are really a better deal. They’re not quite as power efficient as a Pi, but they’re not far off either. I can run any OS (including proxmox) and I get to customize RAM and storage to my needs.
Why are 11 people flagging this as spam? Just because it’s about a commercial product? It’s difficult to produce hardware without charging money for it, since it’s, y’know, a physical object that someone has to build. At least the RPi is open-source hardware.
Neither the hardware nor the firmware are open source, and large chunks of it (principally the GPU) are proprietary secrets.
Specifically, the bootloader is proprietary/secret, as in, you cannot build a customized version yourself. I was actually bitten by this: I wanted to PXE-boot a largish initrd (entire root fs, I think it was 600M compressed) but the bootloader had a lower limit of how much it could download. I asked the PI folks to increase the limit but they refused (probably they had their reasons). So it was a no go. And a 16G PI would be a natural fit for running an in-memory OS.
Try iPXE? There’s a build for the pi here : https://github.com/ipxe/pipxe Then you boot a small (~4MB or so when I’ve used it on x86_64) image via PXE and then use iPXE to pull the rest down via PXE or http(s) (or probably other methods, I’ve not looked beyond those).
Yes, I was thinking of chain booting but decided not to bother (8G was still too tight but might be worth the hassle for 16G). But I didn’t know about the iPXE build for Pi, thanks for the pointer!
It is but the underlying OS is now FOSS. This does not mean that the Pi firmware is FOSS – it isn’t – but it does mean that the code is there to study.
I wrote about it:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/28/microsoft_opens_sources_threadx/
Guessing people parsed “for sale” in the title and flagged it on that basis alone. I wasn’t one of them, but I note that it’s consistent with how Lobsters treats most other product-release links.
This isn’t supposed to be a place to promote products. But we’re aggravatingly inconsistent about that policy; see https://lobste.rs/s/bed56d/mecha_comet_modular_linux_handheld for a recent example.
Caveat: I haven’t flagged this article.
I think spam (“for links that promote a commercial service”) is more applicable than off-topic (“for stories that are not about computing”), but I honestly can see both applying. The reason is this has very little technical detail. The article spends about 3/4 of the words talking about the company’s climate change policy and 1/4 talking about the newly released product. Basically only one (smaller) paragraph gets into any technical specifics about what makes this board different from others.
I’m happy to see a new Raspberry Pi model get released, I’m glad the company is considering how to take care of the Earth, but it certainly seems intended simply to sell the new Raspberry Pi, hence promoting a commercial service and I don’t see how it fits this criteria:
So why haven’t I flagged? As of my writing this comment, my flag would be the balance between positive and neutral votes on the article (+15, 14 flags). This article isn’t so egregious as to make me want to be That Guy and flag it down. Others that feel differently may vote their conscious.
Jeff Geerling did a very in depth review and benchmark of this, which probably would have been the better link to post: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/who-would-buy-raspberry-pi-120
No it is not, and never was.
Indeed the selling point of several Pi rivals is that they are open hardware.
The Pi is entirely closed and not very standards-compliant. It uses closed-source firmware based on ThreadX, and has a unique design and startup sequence: the VideoCore GPU is the primary processor and it loads code into the Arm. Thus the Pis can’t even run a normal Arm bootloader without work, and there is nothing resembling UEFI on them.
Some distros, such as openSUSE on Pi, start by softloading Das U-Boot as a more standard bootloader, and then load the OS from this, just to get the hardware into something closer to a more standards-based Arm computer before loading Linux.
Is it still true for Pi >= 4? https://developer.arm.com/documentation/102677/0100/Set-up-the-Raspberry-Pi explains how to run UEFI on the Pi 4.
Yes.
AIUI the simplified boot process is this:
The GPU boots the computer, loads the Arm code image from SD or wherever, places is it RAM, initalises the Arm core(s) and sets them running what it put in RAM.
If you want, you are perfectly free to put a UEFI loader in that RAM – but don’t kid yourself: it’s no more in control of the computer than the passenger in the front seat of a self-driving train.
Apologies for that … must’ve been a false memory implanted by the aliens.
In fairness, it’s a widespread belief that I’ve seen a lot in other places.
The Pi Pico is FOSS, I believe, but it’s not a general-purpose computer.
The Picos and RP2040 and RP2350 are thoroughly documented but they don’t go as far as being open source. Last time I looked, the Pico board designs are not published, though the reference designs (for the PCB design guide documentation) are available. Some parts of the chip are published, such as the firmware source and the RISC-V cores, but other parts developed by Raspberry Pi Ltd such as the PIO cores are not published. (And of course most of the big IP blocks such as the ARM cores and USB controller are proprietary to other companies.)
Yeah I guess the original title (“16GB Raspberry Pi on sale now at $120”) could be interpreted as being a sale as in promotion, versus just the release announcement which happens to mention the price in the title. Didn’t even think about the confusing wording when I posted this, I just re-used the original title, but I can see how someone could think it’s off-topic.
IMHO more off-topic than spam, but either way its a product announcement for a minor variant of an existing product, hard for something like that to be on-topic (vs new generations where one often can argue that something fundamental enough has changed that it maybe deserves attention. But even then there are limits)
I haven’t tracked a lot of hardware in this class, but the overall price with the doubled RAM seems noteworthy?
I fondly remember rescuing one of the older models from e-waste and turning it into a more “persistent” alarm clock. I know a colleague that runs a whole rack of Pis for various hobbies. I do figure you’re likely more to get storage I/O bound than RAM bound first, but they still fill an interesting niche for a cheap, “beginner” device.
That may still be true… but these model 5’s are a big improvement in IO throughput compared to previous ones, including first class support for an m.2 nvme daughterboard. It’s a huge step up from the days of doing everything on a microsd card.
Because it’s an ad for a single board computer. In what way is it relevant to lobste.rs? I’d not like it if lobste.rs to be a feed on any kind of ordinary computers.
With “any kind of ordinary computer” I mean that it’s not some world first implementation that is also being discussed.
On top of that the article is not just regarding an ordinary computer it’s also just an ad. There’s nothing setting it apart in content from most other ads out there.
Mods have since improved the title, but two reasons. (1) “X on sale for $Y” is always functionally an ad, even though it’s a plain statement of fact, since its function is to encourage the reader to weigh up buying one - IMO Lobsters don’t need that in their feeds; (2) the article itself has scant technical content to discuss, leading me to the conclusion that the main point of this submission is “hey maybe you want to buy this thing”. To me that’s spam regardless of whether the submitter benefits or not.
Look, I’ve been around since the 1991 green-card-lottery spam on Usenet that coined the term, and what you’re describing is not what “spam” means. This was posted one time by an active member, for informational purposes. You can dislike this sort of post for whatever reason, but use more accurate wording.
The Lobste.rs about page notes how it is defined in this community, which is different from how it was originally used.
In this case, spam simply means this article is by a commercial entity attempting to sell one of its products, with very little technical benefit. Not that people believe the article is trying to sell us pills or a new stock market scheme.
I thought the whole point of the raspberry pi was that it was a $35 computer. I guess not anymore lol.
The original Raspberry Pi Model B with 256MiB of RAM cost $35 dollars in 2012. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $48. Today, the Raspberry Pi 5 with 2GiB costs $50. You can also buy a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with 1GiB of RAM for $35, which in 2012 dollars would’ve been $25.
So, exact same cost, or cheaper, vastly more capable at things the original really couldn’t do that all (like be a desktop) while still being just as good as what it was originally designed for.
Do I think you should buy one? Honestly probably not. 98% of people don’t use the GPIO, and if all you need is a low power server, N100 based products have you covered. But really, RPis haven’t gotten super expensive or drifted from their original purpose much at all, other products have just gotten better and cheaper at the main stuff tech professionals and tech hobbyists have used RPis for.
Myself and basically everyone I know who has one has it because it’s a linux box with GPIO/I2C/SPI. That’s what it’s for. Maybe my social circle is abnormally hardware focused, but 98% is a pretty decisive figure. I wonder if there’s some way to actually through like raspbian popcon or something
I think it must be.
I have at least half a dozen Pis and have used them for 12-13 years. I have never used the GPIO for anything and would be happy with a model without one. Talking to others, most people I know don’t use them either.
I’d agree with the “98% never use them” figure.
I have used the GPIO pins on several RPis but not the ones on the (single) unit I have at home - where does that put me? ;)
Standing very heroically indeed with a leg in both camps, perhaps?
A veritable Colossus of Boards.
98% is certainly a number I pulled from my ass, but I don’t know anyone who uses the GPIOs, they all use RPis as low power servers. When RPis got scarce from the pandemic supply shock, almost all discussion online that I saw about what to buy instead centered around MiniPCs that don’t have GPIO. Occasionally I’d see someone point out that they didn’t work as RPi replacement due to the lack of GPIO, but most people didn’t seem to care.
BTW – I forgot to ask. What does:
… mean? I can’t make head or tail of it.
Oops, I accidentally a word, was meant to be “some way to actually check…”
popcon is the Debian project that measures package usage: https://popcon.debian.org/, raspbian is the (i think official?) raspi distro, based on Debian. If using GPIO required installing some package, and raspbian had some equivalent of popcon (idr if it does), it’d be possible to tell roughly how many people use it.
Aha! Right. When I posted I had not only tripped over the missing word but misread “popcon” as “popcorn”, which left me very confused.
popcon is Debians package statistics system: https://popcon.debian.org/
So I’m assuming the question is something like “Is there an equivalent for Raspbian that could deliver useful statistics about people using software that uses GPIOs”. My guess is that the answer is no, because people would more often download such software outside package manager, write their own using libraries obtained elsewhere, …
Yeah, I think this is the reason to get one though. So I have one of the old raspberry pi 2s that I did get for $35 many years ago, and it is in some ways disappointing - it is sitting in a junk box that I almost never use, since it is fairly disappointing as a general purpose computer, not even especially good as an X terminal! (which is why I’m both interested and disappointed in this thing - the new ones might be better computers, but once the price goes up, it has to compete with everything else for that space.)
But it has been useful to me for two things: one is just experimenting with the GPIO pins. Never made anything useful for myself with it…. but knowing how they worked transferred well to work when a client said they have this other ARM device with GPIO pins and also had these lights and buzzers they wanted programmed on it in their business… like that’s not that hard and i could have probably figured it out on the job and stayed on schedule anyway, but having that preexisting experience made it a simple task to do what they wanted to do. So the education aspect worked for me, not lifechanging or anything, but some value.
The other thing I did with that was make a little noise maker and sound monitor for the baby’s room, a small program on a mini computer tucked away on a shelf. Of course, you can buy that kind of thing commercially for cheap anyway, and tons of things can do audio so that’s not unique like gpio (kinda) is, but still, recycling this thing I already had to do the job was kinda cool.
So I feel it was worth the $35, even if it is sitting in a box of random junk right now. Higher price point though feels different, though you do make a fair point they actually do provide a similar thing after inflation nowadays. Oh well, probably not worth getting another one anyway, even if a stronger machine, i don’t actually need it for anything.
Try RISC OS on it. You will probably be amazed how well it runs.
https://www.riscosopen.org/content/
EDIT: I am trying to clarify this. RiscOS is not a Linux, not a Unix, not even in the entire family tree of C-based OSes; it is considerably more different from any C-based OS than Windows is different from Unix.
But RO is a multitasking GUI OS that can handle IPv6, USB and so on, with a choice of languages, editors, and apps, and it runs well on a decade-old Pi with 256 or 512MB RAM. It was originally built for an 8MHz ARM2 with 512 kB of RAM, although this is clearly not that version.
With my journo hat on, talking to RasPi users, my impression – and I am still amazed by it – is that most people never replace the default OS. They should. There are smaller Linuxes for it than Rasbian (e.g. Alpine), and multiple non-Linux options. The Pi can run more different OSes than any other ARM SBC.
Oh, wow! I had no idea that RISC OS was still around. I wrote my first C program in !Edit on RISC OS.
Very much so. It’s FOSS now, it runs on Pi models up to the Pi 4 and 400 (plus various other Arm SBCs), and in the latest release it gained support for the Pi’s built-in wifi chip.
I reviewed the latest FOSS release last year.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/02/rool_530_is_here/
Since then the Risc OS Direct distro has also been updated, which adds more apps. Not tried that yet.
https://www.riscosdev.com/direct/
A Webkit browser is in development – not sure if it’s released yet.
That’s amazing. I thought that was all long dead. I have happy memories of the Archimedes (including many hours playing Lander but I’m pretty sure I did some more productive activities too…)
It’s strange to think that I was using a beautiful graphical desktop operating system in the ’90s, only to then spend most of my professional career in the 21st century using a VT100 emulator.
For that you can get the $35 model (or $10 RPi Zero) though, the big expensive ones are a somewhat more niche mix.
so tbh I didn’t know there still was a $35 model. Every ad I’ve seen for the raspberry pi since covid was like $80 or more, including this one here, hence my original comment. But I’m glad to be corrected that they still offer one!
I bought an $80 pi + case + charger + micdrosd + weird hmdi cable, never used the GPIO but I use it as a little home server for things like pihole, and it’s so good for that. The problem is you basically jump up 3-5x the price once you start looking at the next class of hardware like the Intel NUC’s and such. So even in this $100-150 range it’s still pretty amazing. Edit: Looks like Intels N100 is probably a good middleground between the two these days.
right, that’s the thing, it’s not 3x with those. a cheap N100 mini PC including an SSD can be <$200 too. (I run a Pi I had myself still for such things, but the more expensive RPis are not the “no-brainer, almost no alternative” choice anymore)
I fondly remember using the original B+ as a desktop in 2012. Actually laptop. It was fine for editing and programming, but scrolling in Firefox was unusably laggy. I had to use my phone to read documentation. You can blame people like me for wanting SBCs with more and more ram ever since.
What’s wrong with a considerably expensier SBC from a competitor then? Simple: Only RPi has had graphics drivers, let alone HDMI compatibility to speak of. I could give one honorable mention of the Nitrogen6x, which you could buy with a working portable screen. But here we are over a decade later, and RPi has not really had any competition for all that it is.
The competition, as in other Arm SBCs, heavily agreed. They all seem to have a lot of drawbacks compared to Raspberry Pis. But the competition, as in x86 mini PCs? I think they’re basically on par or strictly better for many use cases. Faster GPUs, faster CPUs, more IO, not quite as low power but still pretty low power, and basically the same price as the RPi models with more RAM, if you need to buy a power supply and case for your RPi. And that price might include decent enough SSD storage too!
I’m looking into Intel N-series CPUs now, but it seems like the N100 and N200 only have default clock speeds at 100MHz vs RPI5’s 2.4GHz, and the Pi5 seems like it consumes about half the idle power. At a glance, the most compelling thing about the N-series chips is the hardware transcoding, assuming it Just Works. I mostly just use my RPIs for home server type workloads; I care about power consumption but not GPIO–should I be looking at N-series computers for these kinds of workloads? Why/not?
Also why is this post hidden/marked as spam? This seems eminently interesting and on topic for this forum?
You must be misreading something, because the N100 has a max clock of 3.4 GHz: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/231803/intel-processor-n100-6m-cache-up-to-3-40-ghz/specifications.html
We’re talking about different clock speed values. I specified “default clock” and you responded with “max clock”.
an N100 has not a “default clock” (whatever that exactly means) of 100Mhz either. (And given its an entirely different CPU, comparing clock speeds as raw numbers is pretty pointless anyways)
If it’s completely idling I’m not sure if it would make any difference… but 100MHz just sounds awfully low to run a modern system.
see other comments: it fairly sure doesn’t, at least not in actual products, and either way focusing on idle clock speed is telling you nothing about performance.
Everything I’ve found on the Internet suggests the N100 has a clock speed of 100MHz. For example. I may be ignorant, but I have a hard time imagining a processor operating at 100MHz (i.e., not TurboBoosting) is going to outperform another operating at 2.4GHz even if they are different chips.
You’re misunderstanding something. There is no such thing as a “default clock”; all processors, both the N100 and the RPi’s BCM2712 included, do not have a fixed clock. The clock speed of the CPU will vary with the workload it is subjected to, so both the N100 and the RPi will clock down as low as they can when idle; this is the 100MHz you’re seeing for the N100. Both CPUs will also clock up with workload; the N100 can clock all the way up to 3.4 GHz on one core while the BCM2712 can to 2.4 GHz. In realistic use cases the N100 isn’t sitting at 100MHz, ever. I can guarantee you my N100 mini PC would be good for nothing if that were the case.
Either way, as the GP says, clock speeds don’t matter for much. You don’t care about what the clock speed is, you care about how fast the CPU can get things done or for how much power. You can compare online benchmarks for that: here’s a comparison on Geekbench of an N100 PC and the Rpi5, the N100 is about 40% faster for a lower TDP. Better yet, get both and measure your workload. Personally, I’d say there’s no reason to get an RPi5 over an N100 unless you need the GPIO.
Thanks for the clarification, the link, and the advice. That’s very helpful. 👍
(I’m fairly sure the “100Mhz” number is just people scraping Intels product database and using a stupid default because there is no number in there for whatever reasons. Looking at a few more useful results shows 800Mhz set on actual products using it, which makes more sense. Or maybe it can indeed be set to go down to 100Mhz theoretically, it’s not entirely impossible)
If it has work to do, it’s not running at base frequency. The same way the RPi5 will not be running at its base frequency of (if a quick search is to be trusted) 1.2/1.4 Ghz when it has work to do, but rather speed up. In both cases, the actual frequency under long-term load will depend on the power envelope set (I’m assuming with the N100 that’ll almost always be 6W) and if the cooling system can match that, for N100 miniPCs I’m seeing numbers of 2.9 GHz quoted for all cores being under load. With modern chips, the frequency they run when they got nothing/almost nothing to do is almost meaningless. So even if we ignore that its two entirely different architectures, you should be looking at measured performance instead the entire time.
2.4GHz is the max clock of the RPi5’s processor?
I don’t think rpi5’s chop has anything like TurboBoost so I think the max and default clock speeds are the same, overclocking notwithstanding,
Modern CPU clock speed management is both very complex and also very different from how you understand it.
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All Raspberry Pi models (except Raspberry Pi 2 B+) are still available without deprecation notice. You don’t need a Pi 5 with 16GB, the most expensive one: you can choose whatever fits you best
I’m a big fan of the original “cheap Linux SBC” concept pioneered by the Raspberry Pi. I used to buy every new Pi as soon as they were released because there was nothing else with the same level of support, community, and value. But honestly, these days the Chinese N100 mini boxes are really a better deal. They’re not quite as power efficient as a Pi, but they’re not far off either. I can run any OS (including proxmox) and I get to customize RAM and storage to my needs.