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.

On a sunny day (Wed, 3 Apr 2024 10:24:00 +0100) it happened Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote in <uuj77i$3r4ca$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Yep, only passive cooling in this Pi 4 8 GB on this GPIO now my IR camera module. But I do have an 8 port Sitecom USB hub and a 4 TB Toshiba harddisk connected. On the USB hub a rtl-sdr stick I can use as spectrum analyzer, or stereo radio receiver, or AIS ship traffic receiver, or follow airplane traffic with dump1090 (made that draw on a map from a server I wrote running on a very old Raspberry

Yes, that was nice too. Linux has Octave too for math, some more.

Have not used MS windows for many years now, Debian is OK, I did modify Debian on all my Raspberries to have xfm as file manager and fvwm as window manager, gives me 9 virtual screens, most run a terminal, one chromium browser (dumped firefox a few weeks back when it started behaving suspicious), in one window alsamixer, and some windows with music notes, some other GUI utilities such as my media player, xosview to see what is loading things, etc etc.

My laptop now > 10 years old now runs Ubuntu. At least everything works, put a Huawei 4 G stick in it and internet all over Europe. This Raspberry has the Huawei 4 G stick in it now so I am online in a flash with one click and offline after that with one click so no hacking and a dynamic IP address to make hacking even more problematic.

Did you have a P4 before the Pi5? If so what's the main difference in experience?

Yea, we will see were it goes...

Just typing all this in 'joe' text editor with ispell as spell checker in the NewsFleX Usenet reader I wrote now ported to Raspberry.. that port needs some work, as the libforms library was ehh well, maybe I should write my own graphical library. I did sort of for some other application I wrote, like that xgpspc thing. The annoying thing about all those new 'versions' is that you need to re-write your stuff all the time as the libs change, some times not for the better. My 20 year old PC upstairs still runs xfree and the old audio system (before Alsa), and works still perfectly with my satellite stuff. Is an AMD 486.

FWIW, my *nix Desktops consist of cheap, refurbished, small form PCs, stuffed with SSDs.

The STM GPIO interface typically provides a digital interface to my electronic circuits. BSD RPis are used as intrinsic IDE hosts while Blue and Black Pills are accessed via a STLink.

Danke,

I generally use Maxima and most recently Julia for its arbitrary precision mathematics, but there are few things that they can't do.

I had an original Raspberry Pi way back with composite video out but never really found something it could do well enough to be interesting. I found cheaper STM32 development boards more to my liking. YMMV

The Pi5 is quite a big step up from there! Even came with working GCC compiler configured in the standard distribution which was nice.

N100 looks quite capable. My only concern is the whiny fans on these very small enclosures. Fan noise increases rapidly with rpm and tiny fans don't move much air. SFF is as small as I like to go.

I haven't got much left that is quite that old. One machine from 2003 that is kept mainly because it has a real parallel port needed for some bitbanging programmers that I still very occasionally need to use.

My spellchequer today wants to turn you into Panatella must be all the food over the Easter Holidays that's affecting it!

If an expensive one fails, it takes just a much.

Jeroen Belleman

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).

It is sometimes worth paying a premium to have a machine that is fast enough for your immediate project needs (even if cheaper ones are more easily available). You pay quite a high premium for that last bit of performance when it is still very new.

Some of the best designed PCs are from the gaming community suppliers. If you remove the graphics card entirely the main CPU graphics system is more than good enough for all 2D design and some 3D rendering work.

They perform incredibly well and have huge slow fans so under ordinary heavy loads they remain very quiet. Ones intended for corporate office workers tend to have inadequate power supplies and small noisy fans reflecting their typical workload and noisy environment.

Your choice but owning several machines of the same vintage leaves you exposed to any glitches in the new machines or their OS's. MS has been known to brick portables on Win10/11 from time to time - not fun at all.

That is a bit OCD.

Playing back an MPEG video is essentially trivial load on any modern machine. Video editing, rendering video content and editing large images is still compute intensive.

Normal office work barely taxes even the most puny hardware.

In the sense that it is a simulation of reality.

There might be an advantage in going to 2 or 3 cores for some problems depending on how smart its use of additional cores actually is but after that you run into memory and/or disk bandwidth problems pretty quickly.

Obviously relaxing the error bounds will speed things up but you have to be careful. LT Spice is deliberately conservative in its choice of parameters so that the solver mostly stays inside a numerically stable simulation (unless you provoke it with a nasty network singularity).

It is even worse for chess problems where the extra cores can easily end up doing work deep down the tree that will *never* be needed because it will be pruned by a higher level algorithm at some stage.