For those like me that don't know the joke:

Two economists are walking down the street. One of them says “Look, there’s a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk!” The other economist says “No there’s not. If there was, someone would have picked it up already.”

Competition is what creates efficiency. Without it you live in a lie.

... and even then it doesn't always prove true.

If one just wants a cheap desktop box to do desktop things with, then they're a terrible option, price-wise, compared to things like used corpo mini-PCs.

But they're reasonably cost-competitive with other new (not used!) small computers that are tinkerer-friendly, and unlike many similar constructs there's a plethora of community-driven support for doing useful things with the unusual interfaces they expose.

They're good for long as the development costs dominate the total costs.

The current RPi 5 makes no sense to me in any configuration, given its pricing.

For comparison there are 9,988,224 GPU compute units in El Capitan and only 1,051,392 CPU cores. Roughly one CPU core to push data to 10 GPU CUs.

So for $3000, that's 3000 hours, or 125 days, (if just wastefully leave them on all the time, instead of turning them on when needed).

Say you wanted to play around for a couple of hours, that's like.. $3.

(That's assuming there's no bonus for joining / free tier, too.)

This. Some cloud providers offer VMs with 4GB RAM and 2 virtual cores for less than $4/month. If your goal is to learn how to work with clusters, nothing beats firing up a dozen VMs when it suits your fancy, and shut them down when playtime is over. This is something you can pull off in a couple of minutes with something like an Ansible script.

In the cloud, worst case I have a bill over 5-6 digits.

And I know my ADD, 2 is not super unlikely.

But if you're someone like me who intends to actively use the hardware for real-world purposes, the cloud often simply can't compete on price. At home, I have a mini PC with a 5600G, 32GB of RAM, and a few TBs of NVME storage. The entire thing cost less than $600 a few years ago, and consumes around 20W of power on average.

Even on the cheapest cloud providers available, an equivalent setup would exceed that price in less than half a year. SSD storage in particular is disproportionately expensive on the cloud. For small VMs that don't need much storage, it does make sense, but as soon as you scale up, cloud prices quickly start ballooning.

You don’t need hardware to learn. Sure it helps but you can learn from a book and pen and paper exercises.

[1] The Framework Desktop is a beast:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44841262

[2] HP ZBook Ultra:

https://www.hp.com/us-en/workstations/zbook-ultra.html

Also the Mac Studio is a bit hampered by its low compute-power, meaning you really can't use a 100b+ dense model, only MoE feasibly without getting multi minute prompt-processing times (assuming 500+ tokens etc.)

Right now the Macs are viable purely because you can get massive amounts of unified memory. Be pretty great when they have the massive matrix FMA performance to complement it.

>cost effective

lmao

It's really not though. I've been a Pi user and fan since it was first announced, and I have dozens of them, so I'm not hating on RPi here; we did the maths some time back here on HN when something else Pi related came up.

If you go for a Pi5 with say 8GB RAM, by the time you factor in an SSD + HAT + PSU + Case + Cooler (+ maybe a uSD), you're actually already in mini-PC price territory and you can get something much more capable and feature complete for about the same price, or for a few £ more, something significantly more capable, better CPU, iGPU, you'll get an RTC, proper networking, faster storage, more RAM, better cooling, etc, etc, and you won't be using much more electricity either.

I went this route myself and have figuratively and literally shelved a bunch of Pis by replacing them with a MiniPC.

My conclusion, for my own use, after a decade of RPi use, is that a cheap mini PC is the better option these days for hosting/services/server duty and Pis are better for making/tinkering/GPIO related stuff, even size isn't a winner for the Pi any more with the size of some of the mini-PCs on the market.

> Another fun fact, the network module of the pi is actually connected to the USB bus, so there's some overhead as well as a throughput limitation.

> Fun fact, the Pi does not have a power button, relying on software to shut down cleanly. If you lose access to the machine, it's not possible to avoid corrupted states on the disk.

With all these caveats in mind, a raspberry pi seems to be an incredibly poor choice for distributed computing

Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Youtube demonstrably wants clickbait titles and thumbnails. They built tooling to automatically A/B test titles and thumbnails for you.

Youtube could fix this and stop it if they want, but that might lose them 1% of business so they never will.

They love that you blame creators for this market dynamic instead of the people who literally create the market dynamic.

Like what about the people who maintain the alpha/sparc/parisc linux kernels? Or the designers behind idk tilera or tenstorrent hardware.

I greatly respect Jeff's work, but he's a professional YouTuber, so his projects will necessarily lean towards clickbait and riding trends (Jeff, I don't mean this as criticism!) He's been a great advocate for doing interesting things with RasPis, but "interesting" != "rational"

And regarding efficiency, in CPU-bound tasks, the Pi cluster is slightly more efficient. (Even A76 cores on a 16nm node still do well there, depending on the code being run).

If it's for personal use, do whatever... there's nothing wrong with buying a $60,000 sports car if you get a lot of enjoyment out of driving it. (you could also lease if you want to trade up to the "faster model" next year) For business, renting (and managed hosting) makes more sense.

Plus cloud gaming is always limited in range of games, there are restrictions on how you can use the PC (like no modding and no swapping savegames in or out).

A lot of people (here, Reddit, elsewhere) speculate about how good/bad a certain platform or idea is. Since I have the means to actually test how good or bad something is, I try to justify the hardware costs for it.

Similar to testing various graphics cards on Pis, I've probably spent a good $10,000 on those projects over the past few years, but now I have a version of every major GPU from the past 3 generations to test on, not only on Pi, but other Arm platforms like Ampere and Snapdragon.

Which is fun, but also educational; I've learned a lot about inference, GPU memory access, cache coherency, the PCIe bus...

So a lot of intangibles, many of which never make it directly into a blog post or video. (Similar story with my time experiments).

Was it fast? No. But that wasn't the point. I was learning about distributed computing.

Jeff has many useful OSS software used by many companies around the world daily - including mine. What have you created ?

private space companies, despite decades of hype and funding, have stagnated by comparison

the fact that SpaceX depends heavily on government contracts just to function is yet another proof: their "innovation" isn't self sustaining, it's underwritten by taxpayer money

are you denying that NASA landed on the Moon?

Elon psyop doesn't work on me, i know who is behind it all, they need a charismatic sales man for the masses, just like Ford, Disney, Reagan and all, masking structural power with a digestible story for the masses

> blanket-blaming capitalism without good reasoning is becoming the new red-flag of "can't think critically"

it's quite the opposite, people unable to take criticism of capitalism, talk about "critical thinking", how is China doing?

> This post is more than 10 years old, I do not delete posts...

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/articles/religion/abortion-case...

I guess GP is referring to that post.

Cf. the various Beagle boards which have mainline linux and u-boot support right from release, together with real open hardware right down to board layouts you can customise. And when you come to manufacture something more than just a dev board, you can actually get the SoC from your normal distributor and drop it on your board - unlike the strange Broadcom SoCs rpi use.

I'm quite a lot more positive about rp2040 and rp2350, where they've at least partially broken free of that Broadcom ball-and-chain.