Engineer Explains: Raspberry Pi is FINALLY Dead, Here's Why

is the Raspberry Pi's 10-year rain finally coming to a close today we introduce a challenger this is Emma board and put it head to head against the Raspberry Pi to see which comes out on top we'll discuss the most common mistakes home lab enthusiasts make when evaluating sbcs and how to correct those we'll also perform a full price comparison including the hidden costs that most reviewers ignore then we'll run some performance benchmarks testing the ram CPU and disk i o speeds I'll even show you a 10 node super cluster I built at the end of this video by the end of this video you'll understand exactly which SBC makes sense for your home lab while keeping your wallet happy too will the Raspberry Pi maintain its grip on the throne or will the changing SBC landscape lead to a new Top Dog let's find out and for the sake of transparency this video is funded by icewell AKA Zima but this was literally the extent of our conversation before and here we are so full disclosure I have no horse in this race I'm simply here to tell you the facts and crack questionable jokes along the way this is a zim aboard which is a single board computer designed to do only two things look cool and serve as your personal micro server and I was pleasantly surprised to find 10 of these at my doorstep so I shank those boxes open and started tinkering Inside the Box you get the following a 12 volt power supply with interchangeable us UK EU faces one Sata cable the SBC itself a user manual and two swag stickers named after Zima Blue from the Netflix series love death and robots this little guy has adequate nerdy lore for me to respect it not to mention it's built like an absolute tank it totally gives me Nokia brick Vibes featuring a custom cooling system that allows it to operate without a fan which provides silent and efficient operation it's basically one large passive heat sink no peripherals or add-ons are needed with the Zim aboard unlike the Raspberry Pi it comes with onboard storage and ships with an international power adapter not to obtain Rectify this device too much but the anatomy of the zimbabort 832 is as follows it features a pcie 2.0 X4 Port two SATA 3.0 ports 2 gigabit Ethernet ports two USB 3.0 ports and a mini display port featuring 4K at 60 hertz the Dual ethernet ports make it a great platform for a personal Nas or a router now you could plug a GPU into this pcie port performance would be held back somewhat by the X4 interface and likely result in a CPU bottleneck but it should work and setting this thing up is insanely easy you literally wire it in with ethernet powered up and it's available on your network this made hooking up a bunch of them into a 10 node cluster surprisingly easy one drawback though is there is no great way to shut this thing down so unlike the pi there is no power switch on the performance side the Zima 832 features an Intel Celeron processor called Apollo Lake the model's n3450 which has four quad cores running from 1.1 to 2.2 gigahertz with a 2 megabyte L2 cache it also has Intel HD graphics 8 gigabytes of memory and 32 gigabytes of onboard storage and that storage is super fast out of the box this thing Sports a Debian based OS dubbed Casa OS which gives you a Mission Control Center and provides one-click installs a fairly common applications like BitTorrent the OS seems to rely heavily on Docker containers which is neat because you can install micro Services via custom Docker containers fairly easily and running containers get represented here in the UI however when I took this thing apart I discovered something really interesting see unlike the Raspberry Pi the Zima comes with an onboard 3 volt CMOS battery which allows it to keep track of time even when the device is powered down which is why on its initial boost it already knew the time whereas a Raspberry Pi would need to do a server sync or have a manual clock set so those are the broad Strokes around the Zima but how does it compare to its predecessor the Raspberry Pi 4 model B well let's start with the elephant in the room price after all wasn't that one of the primary initial appeals of the Raspberry Pi I remember buying my verse Pi zero and Pi 3 and just being stunned at how cheap they were I even got a little Pico for only four dollars and 17 cents sadly now production shortages coupled with contingency buying from hobbyists and wholesalers has made RPI MSRP a thing of the past Evan Upton the creator of the Raspberry Pi reminds us that the RPI Foundation is producing around 10 000 units a day and he expects stock will return to normal levels by the end of this year but at least for now I think we've got to consider current availability is the new normal and that availability is low lucky for us this power vacuum is giving rise to a new era of sbcs and I don't hate it for this video I'll be evaluating the respective Flagship products but do know the Zima has three flavors and our pies also have a few different models on the Zima side of the house we'll be looking at the 832 which msrps for about two hundred dollars Soup To Nuts although you can get a 10 discount fairly easily by opening an incognito window standard shipping appears to be free which puts us at 189.90 all said and done now the Raspberry Pi is where things get tricky as we'll need to go the secondary market route as well as purchase some peripherals to make use of our Raspberry Pi we're going to want a case 32 gigabyte micro SD card and a power supply so the motherboard seems to average about a hundred dollars which is a long ways from its MSRP of 35 dollars but it looks like I'll be able to snag everything I need for about 129.31 putting us at a price differential of about 60 or 22 percent so on price alone Raspberry Pi still seems to come out ahead by a healthy margin even with the current state of the market but what about ongoing price costs such as power consumption next I'm going to run a power consumption test to see where these two guys clock in at keep in mind they're both running headless which means no keyboard and mouse which might draw more power and mess with our tests each are connected to ethernet and have one open SSH connection with my warp terminal so we can see that the idle power consumption for the Zima board is a little over two Watts but what happens when we pin the four CPUs and fully utilize the resources so I'm going to use a tool called sysbench that's going to allow us to do that and on the right here we can say that resource utilization script and now we can see the four cores pinned at a hundred percent so we can see that when the CPUs are pinned on the zimba board the power consumption goes up to about 5.7 Watts so almost triples okay so now we have the same situation going on for our Raspberry Pi and we can see the idle power consumption so I'm going to go ahead and run the sys bench script which will pin the four cores of our Raspberry Pi we can confirm that here so when the Raspberry Pi is fully utilized we can see it jumps up to about 6.4 Watts many of my commenters lament that these price points you might be better off just buying mini PCS from HP Dell or Lenovo but you have to keep in mind that these options would likely result in a higher power draw for instance the HP G4 600 micro can draw 12 to 16 Watts which was on par with the power draw I saw when I hooked up 10 Zim aboards into my super cluster which may not be a huge deal in the US but in Europe it can make a noticeable difference in your power bill so one of the primary differences between these boards to consider is the CPU architecture on one side you have the Zima sporting and Intel x86 chip and on the other side you have the Raspberry Pi with the newer arm architecture and since Angelina Jolie prophesied the rise of armchips in 1995 classic movie hackers risk architecture is going to change everything yeah risk is good I'm left asking myself when has Hollywood ever been wrong there's a real debate here there are a number of advantages of going x86 over arm for non-open Source apps as they just don't have armed support or non-x86 support is patchy I believe x86 seems to see patches and updates more quickly and Os availability is generally quite a bit wider but with apple moving towards arm with apple silicon it makes me think arm processors tend to be less expensive and offer better Energy Efficiency than x86 processors they're also more scalable allowing for greater customization and flexibility in designing solutions for specific needs so for my money I'd prefer to go with the arm architecture given its benefits and my MacBook Pro with M1 Max chip and 64 gigabytes of RAM seems to be doing all right but which device objectively performs better so I'm going to use Linux benchmarking tools sysbench to test the memory CPUs and disk i o speeds okay so on the left I'm connected to my Zimmer board and on the right I'm connected to my Raspberry Pi so let's begin by running the CPU benchmark test okay so I think the Salient metric here is the events per second and we see we've got a 4300 from the Zima board and 5900 from the Raspberry Pi so it looks like when it comes to the CPUs the Raspberry Pi might be ahead okay now we're going to test the memory with this performance Benchmark here which will allocate two gigabytes 10 000 operations per second compared to the Raspberry Pi which was 6 000 operations per second all right next we're going to test disk read write speeds by writing two gigabytes of local files and seeing how long it takes so you can see the zimma board has almost 100 megabyte per second write speed whereas the Raspberry Pi seem to be stolen out about at about 16 megabytes per second probably because the Zimmer has the onboard storage and the Raspberry Pi is using that micro SD card it's probably ways to improve that but to be honest most people are probably using the micro SD card so and so just to prove a point I'm going to use an alternative disk storage device so I connected my Samsung one terabyte SSD to my Raspberry Pi and now I'm going to run the read write test and see how it performs okay so it's still not as fast as the Zima but substantially faster than the micro SD card so on performance it looks like the Zima board does come out ahead using the out of the box setups so what can you do with a zim aboard well for the ultimate display of narcissism I set up a Plex Media Server just so I could watch my own YouTube videos offline on my Fire TV I then set up a local website using nginx it was incredibly ugly I then set up pie hole but because it wasn't running on a pie I renamed it to Zima Shield trademark pending I also created a three node ks3 cluster using kubernetes and Rancher that made me question every decision I've ever made in my life so while the Zima board and other spcs offer some impressive features the Raspberry Pi strong community and software support for the gpio pins make it a valuable tool for many projects plus with its quasi-affordable price point and hopefully long-term availability it's hard to imagine the pie bubble bursting anytime soon and while some may argue that x86 processors offer more power and complexity the trend towards power efficiency and mobile Computing means that arm processors like those used in the Raspberry Pi are becoming more and more prevalent for my money I'd also prefer the Zima to have onboard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and as we've seen the Pi's value lies not just in the performance but in its extensive documentation and the strong community of makers and hobbyists that have built around it so whether you're a seasoned maker or just getting started with sbcs the Raspberry Pi is still a Top Choice for many projects anyways guys thanks for watching

Channel: Data Slayer

Views: 197,639

Keywords: Data Slayer, Single board computers, Zima Board, Raspberry Pi, CPU architecture, power consumption, personal micro server, custom cooling system, eMMC storage, international power adapter, debian based OS, 1-click installs, Plex media server, personal NAS, OpenWrt, pfSense, ad-blocker, piHole, VPN, edge intelligence, strong community, GPIO pins, purchasing decision, SEO, casaos, zima board, arm, risc, x86, raspberry pi, price comparison, orange pi

Id: hms56-Mox9w

Length: 11min 47sec (707 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023