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points by jongjong 2 days ago | 0 comments
It's kind of insane how the higher end Raspberry PIs are almost as powerful as my PC tower. The price is quite low and developer friendly too. Really great products. The lower end products are awesome too.

It's one of the few products I look at with awe and which makes me feel good about the tech industry.

I managed to build a WiFi temperature sensor (which can be substituted with any analog sensor) which streams its data to a web platform (I also built), encrypted over HTTPS (with CA certificate verification), using a $10 Raspberry PI Pico W; built in a single weekend. I can connect it to my phone's WiFi hotspot from anywhere and stream data to my web platform where it displays a realtime chart. $10.

[–] mrheosuper 2 days ago
You have really awful PC.

The Pi5 is even slower than N100 cpu, which is low power mobile laptop cpu.

[–] jongjong 2 days ago
Actually my current machine is 5.5 GHZ with 28 cores but core count only really matters if you have a lot of parallel workloads. Most of my CPUs are idle the vast majority of the time. Raspberry Pi 5's 2.4GHz Quad core doesn't seem so far behind when you consider the physical size difference.

I remember programming ATMEL ATMEGA8s and being amazed as how much I could do with them, so to me, the fact that devices of that size can approach even half the clock speed of a cutting-edge computer, and have multiple cores, is mind-blowing.

[–] lp92 1 day ago
Have you actually benchmarked it? If your current PCs boosting up to 5.5Ghz that means you have a pretty modern PC and quite a lot more powerful than a Pi 5. Also, you're completely missing out the IPC differences even given same clock speed.

If you're going after perf per watt, then sure the Pi will likely win. But not possible for raw performance if what you said is true about having a modern CPU with 5.5 Ghaz boost clock.

[–] mrheosuper 1 day ago
You would be even more amazed to know that some phone SOC can now boost to 5Ghz. It can fit into your hand and run from battery.