Raspberry Pi5 versus other cheap Intel based boxes for general computing

I was quite surprised how sprightly my Pi 5 was. I opted for 8GB more expensive entirely passive cooling so that it can be used as an entertainment streaming system when not being used for other things. (whole thing cost about £120 and is the size of a bar of soap)

In part I got it for the portability and free Mathematica license that comes with it. I haven't found the Debian environment too tiresome despite being a Windows user with a smidgeon of Ubuntu and Android.

I reckon its performance single tasking isn't far off the venerable i7-3770 from a decade or so back (and still pretty capable today).

I was tempted by an N100 based toy PC at Xmas but managed to resist.

Can it run LT Spice? I spend too much time running Spice.

My new big-box Windows machines, monster CPU and lots of ram and SSDs, are disappointing because they only run sims about 2x as fast as my old Win7 machines.

I haven't tried it on LT Spice but it seems to be able to run any floating point code that will compile on it so I don't see why not. It can also drive full QD displays natively at MPEG playback video speeds.

The main weakness as default built is that if you are careless about how you use it you can run out of wear cycles on the sD holding the OS and swap file! I know someone who did just that...

I decided when I had to replace mine that an i5-12600 was about the peak of performance/price that was a significant improvement over the 3770. I don't like paying through the nose for the fastest possible CPUs.

We have sort of hit a point where CPU improvements especially for single threaded code have hit an insurmountable bottleneck. There is a sweet spot for the amount of ram and fast disk. If you put it onto a UPS and enable all go faster options for the SSD cache write through (risking potential data loss if power is ever lost) you may get some improvement. You would have to decide if the speed gain is worth it to you.

If you check LT Spice on various CPUs I think you will find it correlates closely with ram speed and single thread performance on CPU related benchmarks (obviously with a bias towards floating point code).

If you are prepared to risk data loss then another option is using a RAID0 array of identical disks will get you another factor of 2 or 3 if the system is mainly disk bandwidth limited (and it may be if extensive logging of data is occurring during a simulation).