He worked surprisingly hard to make the N100 look good considering it should beat the Pi in every category.
If power consumption isn’t the be all end all concern for you, there is a lot to be said for the ability of x86 to boot into just about anything. You still don’t get that with ARM.
No one would want to buy this to use with high-demanding applications, but for hobbies and trivial stuff. With that said, even a Orange pi zero 3 is “better” than both Rpi 5 and the n100.
tl;dr: The magic word is convenience.
I consider my $200 n95 inc. 16gb ram 512gb m2 and 6-8w idling better value than a Pi tbh.
I got an N100 with the same specs for $160. It’s so good.
But i want to spend 3 hours trying to set up a NES emularor.
At this point, I’m not sure why someone would buy a Pi. I used my Pi 3 for years and got it super cheap on release.
At the ever increasing cost of the pi and how limiting it is, the n100 is a no brainer.
At the ever increasing cost of the pi and how limiting it is, the n100 is a no brainer.
Depends on the use case I guess.I prefer to have an ARM based SBC to play with (rather than an Intel based box) to test different Linux distributions and BSD without GUI.
There’s gotta be a bunch of niche cases why a pi is better - but generally…not.
What usecase is arm based linux and bsd all that important? Outside of arm dev - probably not much else.
Perhaps you are thinking in best and better and what most people want. For me there is something like curiosity (Not very uncommon in the open source world) and learning new things.Besides that I am not very amused about Intel and their Spectre and Meltdown failures which is still not a closed book with new attacks being reported in the news.For hobby and work, computer security and privacy is something that I cannot neglect.
Yep, that’s what ‘generally’ and ‘niche’ means. The n100 doesnt have hyper threading so isnt subject to that kind of attack - btw the same attack that AMD has been subject to to many times over and over. Not sure what’s good on ARM curiosity - still interested to know.
Power consumption
Pi power consumption is going up too. And x86 keeps coming down. Idle power draw the pi wins you’d get 2x longer idle. But under load if you compared the workoutput to wattage I bet it’s pretty close.
It’s closer than it once was. But a Pi 5 running at full pelt is still nowhere near an N100 running at full pelt. In the comments, the author says that the power consumption of the N100 during the benchmarks was 3x that of the Raspberry Pi 5.
N100s have their place for sure, but for simple home labbing, I think they’re overkill. But if you’re running an Arr stack, it’s definitely worth considering.
But the N100 running at full pelt will be running way more intensive applications than Pi 5. In everyday scenario, that means you can run more applications comfortably without going “full pelt”. AFAIK
I deeply regret my pi5 purchase. Here I was hoping to use it as a low power application server but I cannot get Ethernet working reliably after a hot reboot. Seems to be a distro agnostic issue, though I acknowledge this could be a part failure.
Before you throw the pi5 out, buy a USB Ethernet adapter ? I have a few of them and they work fine for me with Linux and BSD.
That’s not a bad idea. I can give that a try for sure. I’m guessing the power implications here are minimal as well?
I’m guessing the power implications here are minimal as well?
That’s an interesting point I didn’t think about.I don’t know and I have no gadget to test that.
Actually once I’ve left the USB Ethernet adapter in a smart phone and forgot to take it out (but I did take the Ethernet cable out). The next day I saw that the phone had used a lot of battery power.I guess the phone kept talking to the adapter and the build in small light.I have one adapter without a light so I can test how much battery that would roughly consume, just out of curiosity.
No problem at all. I can try to measure this with a socket wattmeter I have lying around.
The power implications aren’t likely to he a deal breaker, but I do love the idea of operating an application server at approx 7W (that said, the same power envelope is also achievable on certain x86-64 home server platforms now).
No problem at all. I can try to measure this with a socket wattmeter I have lying around.
The power implications aren’t likely to he a deal breaker, but I do love the idea of operating an application server at approx 7W (that said, the same power envelope is also achievable on certain x86-64 home server platforms now).
Right.Meanwhile the on-board Ethernet port could become more reliable with newer software or some tweaks ?
That’s my hope, as mentioned elsewhere I’m still awaiting uboot updates for broader OS support, so I guess I’m fine to hang on to it.
Perhaps I picked this up a little early, though it has been fun to tinker and benchmark with.
Yeah from what I’ve seen of Jeff geerling’s testing it can use all of a 2.5g and about 3.5 of a 5gbit adapter
I don’t know if you’ve already tried this, but I’ve had weird behavior with older Pi3s when the power supplies weren’t up to snuff.
A good 5V/10A (yeah I know they only need 5A) sorted out one of mine that had a heavy load of Neopixels running on it, even though the neopixels had their own 5V supply.
I haven’t needed to get a Pi5 for any of my projects and really use them as big arduinos in certain uses (better for camera detection and remote reprogramming).
I’m the opposite, my Pi 5 is my favourite thing!
I’m glad it’s working for you. I’m wondering if my issues will be resolved in the future by firmware upgrades (also holding out for uboot updates anyway). Not giving up on it just yet.
Is there a thread or bug report about your issues? That’s definitely something you need to be active about them resolving.
You’re right. There is on the raspberry pi forums, I’ve chimed in on the past, will need to check back in with it.
Hopefully they sort it ASAP.
Someone like me who heard how cool raspberry pi was and tried to get one for years and then finally got it this year, but turns out that there’s better stuff out there in the market now
They were awesome when they were $30. Nice support, do niche things, but now they’re the same price as a decent Window micro PC without the Linux hastle.
But I’d have to use Windows with those. 🤢
No, you’d have to remove Windows. Much more enjoyable!
At this point, I’m not sure why someone would buy a Pi. I used my Pi 3 for years and got it super cheap on release.
You mean why anyone would buy a new Pi that is not a Pi3 ? Pi4 can boot from USB meaning that the usage of a SD card can be omitted completely. Not sure a Pi3 can do that or do that easily ?
I’m using a Pi 3B+ this way, booting from a usb nvme enclosure. It probably works with the 3B as well.
From a person who builds robots, three notes:
- Camera
Raspberry Pi has two CSI (camera serial interface) connectors on board, which is a considerable advantage over having to deal with USB webcams. This matters if your industrial robot must see the work area faster, your competition robot must run circles around opposing robots, or more sadly - if your drone must fly to war. :( On Raspberry Pi, in laboratory conditions (extreme lighting intensity), you can use the camera (with big ifs and buts) at 500+ frames per second, not fast enough to photograph a bullet, but fast enough to see a mouse trap gradually closing. That’s impossible over USB and unheard of to most USB camera makers.
- Optimized libraries
I know that Raspberry Pi has “WiringPi” (a fast C library for low level comms, helping abstract away difficult problems like hardware timing, DMA and interrupts) and Orange Pi recently got “WiringOP” (I haven’t tried it, don’t know if it works well). I don’t know of anything similar on a PC platform, so I believe that on NUC, you’d have to roll your own (a massive pain) or be limited to kilohertz GPIO frequencies instead of megahertz (because you’d be wading through some fairly deep Linux API calls).
- Antenna socket
Sadly, neither of them has a WiFi antenna socket. But the built-in WiFi cards are generally crappy too, so if you needed a considerable working area, you’d connect an external card with an external antenna anyway. Notably, some models of Orange Pi have an external antenna, and the Raspberry Pi Compute Module has one too.
Is there an AMD equivalent of the N100?
