It's genuinely crazy how much better value an N100 is and how much better it works out of the box than a Pi for anything that is a little server, plex/jellyfin, self hosting project that doesn't need to talk to electronics/GPIO.
Caveat being about my comment is my N100 us used mostly as a Jellyfin server/torrent downloader running windows but has two SSDs inside it and has worked flawlessly for 2 years. Not sure how well it performs under Linux but I've used Pi's a lot previously and this beats it in terms of getting the job done and in price for a similar Pi setup.
To be fair it wasn't always like that. I remember a time when you could get a semi-top-of-the-line raspberry model for under 30 bucks. That was peak hobbyist time for me and I still have many of those lying around, but I haven't bought a new one for a long time now. First they went through some weird feature creep, then the pandemic hit with supply chain issues, then inflation, then the IPO... It's nice that the founders got to make bank with something that has immeasurable value for letting people discover modern tech, but somewhere along the line they got completely lost. Looking at the N100 I feel like building something again for the first time in years. It's not as pure as it was back then, but damn it is useful.
Eh, i thinl they just changed their business model from hobbyist centric to industrial. Which slows the advancements because industry wants stability and longevity.
Im about to deploy pis in locations that use dumb 1200$ PLCs and esoteric ladder programs requiring technicians who know nothing about the logic of the system.
With Pi, we eradicate that artifice and allow self service and ease of upgrades.
man, i couldn't hit the upvote button hard enough. That is a very cool breakout, thank you for the link. I'm already thinkking about that breakout connected to the 16 channel PWM breakout I already have. Now i can play around with servos, and many other things, right from my laptop with all my usual build tools instead of having to power up my pi zero and connect over ssh first. I love Adafruit, they do so many cool things.
If you can do without SPI there's also https://www.adafruit.com/product/4471
You can also just get the chip (MCP2221A) in a DIP package and just pluck it in a breadboard. All you need is two bypass caps and two pullup resistors if you need I2C.
There was maybe a short period of time when RPi offered a decent compute for money if ever. But all of that time it's about the ecosystem and simply being the most popular platform. Any hardware library, you take it and you know somebody tested it on this exact hardware with the same operating system. When doing hardware stuff it can be really painful to debug. You don't want to also be wondering if maybe some pin is handled differently on your box than RPi etc.
Yeah; honestly if you're going to integrate I2C/UART/SPI, cellular, serial bus stuff, PoE, or anything like that into a project, the Pi (4/5) makes that simple, and almost always painless.
Having well-supported GPIO and documented interfaces is nice, when you want to do anything outside normal 'compute' use cases.
The Pi 4 is still a great option for throwing into random spots for $35 and burning 1-2W of power. The Pi 5 less so, in that common homelab use case.
I wish they made a Pi Zero 2 non-W with an Ethernet port, for $15; that would be the perfect little 'more than microcontroller' endpoint for a lot of things.
The ecosystem (and in the early days, price) is about the only thing they’ve ever had going for them.
They’ve otherwise always been mediocre boards in pretty much every respect. Slow, relatively power hungry, and powered by a set top box SOC that is NDAed out the wazoo.
I found that the mini PCs with the N100 are much more convenient because I don't have to deal with custom OS or packages. I'm not a developer, and wanted the easiest method to get a Linux server running. After struggling with the limitations of the custom builds required for an SBC, I found it so refreshing to be able to install the general Linux distros available for the x86/x64 platforms.
This is a very underrated feature of x86/64 platforms. All these ARM boards sound (and can be) so fun, but the level of polish leaves much to be desired when you're tired of tinkering and want the project to be done.
RPi is a good option if one has less RAM requirements especially if you take into account the quality of the drivers and software support in general.
RPi can be a compelling option if you need lower power draw. It does take some effort to squeeze out power efficiency but if the requirement can't be handled by a microcontroller then it is the most convenient of-the-shelf option.
For everything, RPi isn't a very compelling option. Even for GPIO, during RPi shortage I started experimenting with just using STM32 dev boards connected via USB to a NUC or an old PC and it worked well. But I just prefer to use ESP8266 or ESP32 for those tasks most of the time. Bandwidth and latency of USB communication/wifi to the main device has been low enough for it not to be a concern for me and I recon outside of very specific robotics cases it won't be for most.
CSI port is quite nice though and not many great alternatives.
I got an old Mac mini 2014 like 5 years ago, 2nd hand, installed Debian on it, and after the first few days smoothing out bugs, it's worked rock solid since.
On 24/7.
Never heard the fan ever spin up either. Not sure if that's just broken in Debian or the fan just doesn't speed up unless really hot. But either way, seems to not effected it thus far.
I mostly went this route vs Pi because I didn't want the pain of working with ARM. x86 "just works" with 99% of things. Where are a lot of cases with ARM you end up compiling code just to do what you're after. Anything off the popular apps.
Hey, I thought of getting the same machine recently! What’s the power consumption? And what about things like remote turn on? I have a beefy server that doesn’t work 24/7, but when I need it, I wake-on-LAN it from a Raspberry Pi. What about something similar with Mac minis? And what about power loss, will it turn on back again? I value that a lot from these SBCs.
Agreed. Especially for a home media server, an underrated element not mentioned in the article is that something like the N150 is going to have intel quicksync for hardware transcoding, and the pi is going to be stuck with software implementations if it needs to transcode something which is going to make a big difference in streaming media performance.
It is also possible to get the best of both worlds. The ODYSSEY features both a Celeron J4125 and RP2040 co-processor. I have an older model and find this combination very handy. I run Proxmox on it and it works very well.
This year I built a NAS . My focus was to optimize the price not the power, so I planned to go with a raspberry 5 or a raxda 5c because of their lower consumption. For what I gathered a RPI 5 and similar draw 3W idle and 12W at full power and a N100 based computer draw 9W at idle and 24W at full power (approximately of course).
But then I looked at the power consumption of the consumer grade HDD disks. 4 disks would add between 10 and 14W at idle and between 16 and 20W in operation, and suddenly the advantage of the arm based computers in power consumption is less striking.
Moreover you can find on AliExpress N100 mini-pc for 120€ with 16gb RAM and 512gb SSD. Aliexpress is risky but it was much less than the RPI5 with 16GB RAM or just a bit more than the raxda 5C 16GB , both without drive, case and power supply. And the raxda 5C would have been also bought in AliExpress so no almost as risky as my N100.
At the end, for cheaper to buy and not too much more expensive in power consumption I went with the mini-pc. I lost the possibility to use extension cards, especially the one that allows to connect up to 5 HDD, but a 4 port USB HDD dock proved sufficient for my needs.
9W at idle for the N100 is similar to what I get with my N100 based PC. Although under windows it's often sitting at 10-12W.
I also see lower power consumption with an 8th Gen intel Core system.
The small cores that the N100 use are size efficient, but not necessarily power efficient. The N100 chip is just not that efficient power-consumption wise.
how did you get a 6500T to idle so low? Is that CPU power or total system power? I have a T part from the next generation, I don't remember the exact model. It's low but it isn't that low.
+1 to the ability to use PCIe cards - a RaidZ2 array of spinning rust will saturate a 1Gb link without breaking a sweat, and with 10Gb SFP+ cards being so cheap it's a nice upgrade (although if you care about power then a newer card like the Intel x710)
If you want something less "risky", ASRock Industrial has mini PCs which are great. I have an AliExpress N150, fully passive which worked just fine but then I saw the shiny of the Arrow Lake-H platform. Ended up getting a NUC BOX-225H for Opnsense. Way overkill, it's great!
The Arrow Lake-H platform can have up to 28 PCIe lanes where as the N150 gets 9. Something to think about if you want dual NIC + plenty of NVMe drives.
I have several asrockrack mobos and this is the first time I am hearing of asrockind, very interesting and there are a TON of different models here
Do any of these asrockind machines have a BMC?
I just got a minisforum s100, it's 4c8g n100 and POE which is pretty sweet. If only it had Intel vpro or some sort of BMC it would be perfect. I can attach a pikvm but looks like I need to do surgery on it to interface with the power switch. WakeOnLan has been really unreliable in my tests so far.
Low cost x86_64 solutions beat the pants off ARM in the PPPITA (performance per pain in the arse) department. The Raspberry Pi software ecosystem advantage nopes the moment x86 shows up to the party. Granted, it does suck the fun out of spending a weekend trying to get an application to compile.
Whether it's Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, or anything similar, by the time you buy the SBC and accessories, you're looking at around $100. The N100 or N150 are obvious choices if you're looking for a small, low power block of silicon to get something done.
Yes, its slow and its ARM-based. So if you want things to just work (tm), N100 is a much, much better choice. You don't have to fiddle around with the configs to reduce writes to the SD card, figure out how to fix issues with ARM ecosystem, yadda yadda yadda.
It also limits what you want to do. For example, it is simply not powerful enough to run a smooth personal computer (video watching + light browsing).
I’m going to argue there’s no difference in “ecosystem” between arm and x86 anymore. It’s as simple as compiling with a flag. Your frustrations are your own.
I will give you the extra cost of the accessories and plugs you need just to get a raspberry pi up and running.
Currently with the latest pi os version, moonlight streaming's video hardware support doesn't work.
While it's the the fault of the moonlight devs (also you can compile it yourself to get it working), the binary package version has been broken for 2+ months now.
If I was using archlinux on x86 I wouldn't have problems like this.
The Raspberry Pi ecosystem makes the device worthless as soon as you factor in commodity parts that have been marked up far beyond their generic counterparts. And then worst, all of the vendors selling generics targeting Raspberry Pi devices mark those up too, so it's wash. You're better off buying the official accessories because there's no benefit to buying the generics to save money.
After everything is accounted for, if you don't need access to GPIO, Intel chips and all their related hardware are a better value.
So Raspberry Pi beyond the model 4 isn't competitive anymore unless you factor in this specific requirement.
The thing is, the site earns me maybe $100-200 in Amazon Affiliates referral links per month (which is nothing to sneeze at... but that's not moving the needle on a mortgage payment).
I put maybe 10-15 hours/month into writing and prepping blog posts (every one is either fully written from scratch _after_ making a video, or is my transcript edited for blog/readership).
My blog is mostly a scratchpad for my own needs (I like being able to Google my projects, so I can use Google/DDG as my own note search engine), but I get why many people who make video (which can earn an income) don't spend the extra time and write up decent blog posts as well.
(But I prefer reading much more than video content).
I recently noticed that Skatterbencher does this, with articles for each video. It’s a fantastic format, especially in cases where the content is something you might want to refer to later without having to rewatch the whole thing.
This is probably something AI can help with. Given a published video, write a blog post version. With some work you can probably get a first draft with solid links and appropriate tone, reducing the effort down to an hour per post or better.
I think I mostly agree. To me, the Pi Zero is the real product these days. The regular Pi models are too expensive and more powerful than they need to be. The Zero is more in line with the original concept in my opinion.
As the article shows, even power consumption can be debatable. If you're looking to get a certain amount of work done, the Intel mini PC can do it faster expending less power thanks to the smaller transistor size it uses. Maybe there are scenarios where continuous idle power is more important and the RPi still wins (there's no idle power graph in the article) but even if you're power-constrained, the Pi isn't the best choice anymore.
The GPIO header and community remain a solid reason to still opt for the Pi, but the age of "raspberry pi as a cheap home server" is pretty much over, thanks to Intel and AMD slowly watching up to ARM.
Note that the Odroid H3 with an Intel N5105 can do less than 2W< idle, which is competitive with the RPI5. The next generation H4 is even more efficient.
The Pi 5 isn’t very low power at full tilt, but it’s much slower than any of the x86 SBCs from the last few years.
There are at least two SBCs that have N100s and an RP2350 or 2040 onboard that can do you gpio, and at least one that has native GPIO. I have a Radxa X4 and it runs Arch great (only downside is the crappy stock cooler, no cases, and the unfortunate Pi B form factor).
Word of warning on those GMKtec PCs. They put all their drivers on a Google Drive account that they don't pay for, and there are no known mirrors of some of the drivers. So when you suddenly need to do a reinstall one day, remember that their GDrive will be over-quota for a month and you'll be SOL for a few weeks unless you can match the drivers to the ones from the OEMs.
This is the most wtf thing I have read on Hacker News in a day or so. Thanks, I was considering them as an N100 alternative to my Raspberry Pi 4. Maybe I'll search a little more...
Some industrial Atom N150 boards include GPIO, SATA, M.2, discrete TPM and TXT/DRTM-capable BIOS for Windows IoT and future Linux, https://www.cnx-software.com/news/twin-lake/.
There are some creative NAS form factors with N150, but BIOS updates from random OEMs are not predictable, https://www.cnx-software.com/news/nas/. Hopefully coreboot can support more Atom N150 devices.
Except for the Pico (which is very different from the full RPi), you could do all that with a mini-PC.
There are certainly usecases, especially using the RPi's low-level IO, where that's not possible, but as you yourself have shown, people do often get into situations where they are competitors.
I'm not the GP, but for my ads-b decoder, it runs on a Pi Zero 2W, which at the time cost under $15 and draws very little power. It's convenient having the computer right next to the antenna to avoid thinking about cables. Runs for a couple days on 100Wh of backup battery.
(I personally find a ton of value out of the Pico and the zero, and less out of the main main, higher powered raspberry Pi line)
Readit News
Caveat being about my comment is my N100 us used mostly as a Jellyfin server/torrent downloader running windows but has two SSDs inside it and has worked flawlessly for 2 years. Not sure how well it performs under Linux but I've used Pi's a lot previously and this beats it in terms of getting the job done and in price for a similar Pi setup.
You still can, but its performance will be dog-slow at PC/web/server tasks compared to an Intel NUC off the used market.
That's why most people who bough those RPis had them collecting dust after a few weeks since you can blink LEDs with an 5$ Arduino/ESP32 too.
Im about to deploy pis in locations that use dumb 1200$ PLCs and esoteric ladder programs requiring technicians who know nothing about the logic of the system.
With Pi, we eradicate that artifice and allow self service and ease of upgrades.
https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264
Having well-supported GPIO and documented interfaces is nice, when you want to do anything outside normal 'compute' use cases.
The Pi 4 is still a great option for throwing into random spots for $35 and burning 1-2W of power. The Pi 5 less so, in that common homelab use case.
I wish they made a Pi Zero 2 non-W with an Ethernet port, for $15; that would be the perfect little 'more than microcontroller' endpoint for a lot of things.
They’ve otherwise always been mediocre boards in pretty much every respect. Slow, relatively power hungry, and powered by a set top box SOC that is NDAed out the wazoo.
RPi can be a compelling option if you need lower power draw. It does take some effort to squeeze out power efficiency but if the requirement can't be handled by a microcontroller then it is the most convenient of-the-shelf option.
For everything, RPi isn't a very compelling option. Even for GPIO, during RPi shortage I started experimenting with just using STM32 dev boards connected via USB to a NUC or an old PC and it worked well. But I just prefer to use ESP8266 or ESP32 for those tasks most of the time. Bandwidth and latency of USB communication/wifi to the main device has been low enough for it not to be a concern for me and I recon outside of very specific robotics cases it won't be for most.
CSI port is quite nice though and not many great alternatives.
I mostly went this route vs Pi because I didn't want the pain of working with ARM. x86 "just works" with 99% of things. Where are a lot of cases with ARM you end up compiling code just to do what you're after. Anything off the popular apps.
Things are better now, but still a risk.
https://www.seeedstudio.com/ODYSSEY-X86J4125800-v2-p-5531.ht...
But then I looked at the power consumption of the consumer grade HDD disks. 4 disks would add between 10 and 14W at idle and between 16 and 20W in operation, and suddenly the advantage of the arm based computers in power consumption is less striking.
Moreover you can find on AliExpress N100 mini-pc for 120€ with 16gb RAM and 512gb SSD. Aliexpress is risky but it was much less than the RPI5 with 16GB RAM or just a bit more than the raxda 5C 16GB , both without drive, case and power supply. And the raxda 5C would have been also bought in AliExpress so no almost as risky as my N100.
At the end, for cheaper to buy and not too much more expensive in power consumption I went with the mini-pc. I lost the possibility to use extension cards, especially the one that allows to connect up to 5 HDD, but a 4 port USB HDD dock proved sufficient for my needs.
That number seems suspicious. Right now my i5-6500T server is idling at <5W and an N100 is supposed to be even more efficient.
I also see lower power consumption with an 8th Gen intel Core system.
The small cores that the N100 use are size efficient, but not necessarily power efficient. The N100 chip is just not that efficient power-consumption wise.
Dead Comment
The measurement was done via a smart plug running tasmota (and the tasmota exporter) so I'd say it's pretty realistic.
I also have an HP MicroServer Gen8 with a 20W Xeon cpu (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/53401/i...) and four disks... It also idles at ~21W (again, as reported from tasmota-based smart plugs).
https://www.asrockind.com/en-gb/industrial-computer-system
The Arrow Lake-H platform can have up to 28 PCIe lanes where as the N150 gets 9. Something to think about if you want dual NIC + plenty of NVMe drives.
Do any of these asrockind machines have a BMC?
I just got a minisforum s100, it's 4c8g n100 and POE which is pretty sweet. If only it had Intel vpro or some sort of BMC it would be perfect. I can attach a pikvm but looks like I need to do surgery on it to interface with the power switch. WakeOnLan has been really unreliable in my tests so far.
Whether it's Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, or anything similar, by the time you buy the SBC and accessories, you're looking at around $100. The N100 or N150 are obvious choices if you're looking for a small, low power block of silicon to get something done.
Is it that the pi is slow?
I'm not trying to disagree, I just don't see the savings everyone in this thread is claiming.
Yes, its slow and its ARM-based. So if you want things to just work (tm), N100 is a much, much better choice. You don't have to fiddle around with the configs to reduce writes to the SD card, figure out how to fix issues with ARM ecosystem, yadda yadda yadda.
It also limits what you want to do. For example, it is simply not powerful enough to run a smooth personal computer (video watching + light browsing).
I will give you the extra cost of the accessories and plugs you need just to get a raspberry pi up and running.
While it's the the fault of the moonlight devs (also you can compile it yourself to get it working), the binary package version has been broken for 2+ months now.
If I was using archlinux on x86 I wouldn't have problems like this.
After everything is accounted for, if you don't need access to GPIO, Intel chips and all their related hardware are a better value.
So Raspberry Pi beyond the model 4 isn't competitive anymore unless you factor in this specific requirement.
I don’t always. I find plenty of Linux stuff that was never compiled for ARM (printer drivers tend to be awful for this).
> If you prefer to read the post instead, please continue:
More sites like this, please
I put maybe 10-15 hours/month into writing and prepping blog posts (every one is either fully written from scratch _after_ making a video, or is my transcript edited for blog/readership).
My blog is mostly a scratchpad for my own needs (I like being able to Google my projects, so I can use Google/DDG as my own note search engine), but I get why many people who make video (which can earn an income) don't spend the extra time and write up decent blog posts as well.
(But I prefer reading much more than video content).
The GPIO header and community remain a solid reason to still opt for the Pi, but the age of "raspberry pi as a cheap home server" is pretty much over, thanks to Intel and AMD slowly watching up to ARM.
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There are at least two SBCs that have N100s and an RP2350 or 2040 onboard that can do you gpio, and at least one that has native GPIO. I have a Radxa X4 and it runs Arch great (only downside is the crappy stock cooler, no cases, and the unfortunate Pi B form factor).
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Dead Comment
There are some creative NAS form factors with N150, but BIOS updates from random OEMs are not predictable, https://www.cnx-software.com/news/nas/. Hopefully coreboot can support more Atom N150 devices.
I use RPi for little hobby projects
- RPi Pico for being the payload that flies around the world in a PicoBalloon
- Decoding NOAA weather imagery and storing it in my Google Drive
- Full time AIS message decoder and tracker
- Full time ADS-B and MLAT receiver
- Runs my RetroPie setup
- Runs my OctoPrint setup
I wouldn’t replace much of that with an Intel NUC style computer
There are certainly usecases, especially using the RPi's low-level IO, where that's not possible, but as you yourself have shown, people do often get into situations where they are competitors.
Can you explain why?
(I personally find a ton of value out of the Pico and the zero, and less out of the main main, higher powered raspberry Pi line)
Why is that? Because you think the N100 isn't capable enough or for some other reason? Because N100 definitely can outperform a raspberry pi
But a pi pico is definitely a totally different thing. I don't think anyone here is talking about replacing a microcontroller with a PC