Pi5 ... Money Spent In A Niche With Too Many Good Competitors ?

No other ARM board comes close to having as much support.

A cheaper or more powerful ARM board where the OS never gets updates and/or that has features that simply never work right is not an alternative to a Pi.

In 2014 I bought an AMD Kabini 5350 CPU x86 + Motherboard for about £50. The same price as the rPi. The AMD Kabini was massively faster than the rPi, about level with the rPi4 which came out 5 years later.

Intel/AMD will lower prices to compete with the rPi5 or rk3558 SoC systems. Now, the x86 N95 is about level performance with the rk3558s based oPi5.

The rPi5 is a real PC. If it gets proper GPU drivers, the oPi5 will be even better. The Apple M1 SoC is going head to head with intel 86 PCs.

So rather than the rPi becoming an also-ran, they, or small Arm SoC systems like them, look to be the future.

Try the rPi5, it is good. Pi OS is good. I've been looking at Unix like Windows PC alternatives since Sun Sparcs in the early 90s, I'm more impressed now, than I have ever been in the past.

This is true at the moment with the Orange Pi 5, but there are promises of new GPU drivers such as Panthor being released which might change this.

Il 18/12/2023 03:09, 56g.1173 ha scritto:

Are you saying for use as a desktop pc?

because you would have to consider the relationship between power and performance and especially the wattage consumed to get that power and performance...

I think raspberries, even the new Pi 5, have a ratio:

power/performance/consumption still very favorable compared to the X86s you linked...

you might also consider the ratio of expressible to usable power, and in this case ARMs are better than X86s

I think that is the case. My friend, who used to work for ARM simply said 'we had no money to make a big chip, so we made a small one, we kept its simple and worked hard on a comprehensive instruction set, and gave it lots of registers so that most instrictions were very fast and in-chip. It was streets ahead of an 8080.

I am finally abandoning Intel slowly device by device. This PC will probably be the last device as I need to run legacy XP and programs in a VM.

And that is what is driving the ARM revolution right now. Total cost of ownership including electricity costs.

What is driving the Pi against other ARM platforms seems to be cost and support, rather than performance.

I'm happily running Windows programs on the Twister OS, on a Raspberry Pi 400.

Worth a look. The program (PlanePlotter) uses network IO and no special devices.

I have a Banana Pi ... it has some "issues". Still managed to get it to do one useful thing properly though. Figuring out what was the proper OS image to use was also difficult.

"Orange" seems a bit better. Alas, like Banana, the older versions didn't even have proper wi-fi.

In any case, I'm talking about MARKETS. The "PI" name is big, but if P5s really don't offer much over x86 rivals in terms of performance/price then people WILL go elsewhere. My concern is that they spent all that money/effort for a product that belongs in an already-crowded niche.

Been looking at P5s ... but I really may BUY a BeeLink because it's the same price, similar/better performance, and offers more software possibilities. Comes in a nice box too .......

See my point ?

yes the support, the wide support of the Pis, is very actractive because of intrinsecal quality and expandability (of the support)

It's one of the reasons I will stay with Pis. I'm actually moving from a Beaglebone Black to a Pi 4 for one application just at the moment. I'm not interested in using my Pis as desktop machines. My 'work' machines (as in systems with a keyboard and screen, for writing programs, for using my browser, for sending E-Mail, etc.) are x86 based but, more important, they come as integrated boxes with space for multiple disk drives, card readers and so on. Making a Pi into such a system is 'messy' IMHO.

BBBs are very good - for what they're meant for. I will not say anything bad about them. I'm building a home security system around a BBB - with an Ard aux to deal with various inputs. MIGHT sub a Pi for the BBB, but so far I see little advantage.

PI, so far, has been pretty stable and CAPABLE. Likely it will STAY that way.

The PROBLEM is not so much 'tech' - it's BIZ.

With the Pi5 they have invested LOTS of money/effort to create a board that is in a sphere with a LOT of competition price/capability-wise. Somewhere I listed a number of x86 mini-boards/systems that are PRICE/PERFORMANCE-competitive with the Pi5. The low-end "BeeLink" is maybe the greatest competitor at this moment. I will likely buy one - BEFORE I buy a Pi5.

Yes, UK residents can get PIs cheaper - but that's not true for the rest of the world. Price a Pi5 on US Amazon and see .... NOT "cheap". Same applied to Pi4's ......

My concern is that RPi-Inc may have murdered itself.