Re: Raspberry Pi5 versus other cheap Intel based boxes for general computing

On 4/4/2024 2:02 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

I decided when I had to replace mine that an i5-12600 was about the peak of performance/price that was a significant improvement over the 3770. I don't like paying through the nose for the fastest possible CPUs.

I've found that surplus server-class machines are the best price-performance
point.  Businesses dump them "regularly".  But, consumers typically don't want
them (size) and cost to ship (eBay).  I just picked up a T340, T320, T420
and T<something> for a *total* outlay of $15.  96GB ECC RAM per CPU (some dual,
some single).  500G boot SSDs (too small to be useful for me).  Dual 10G NIC
on top of internal NIC.  Redundant 750W power supplies.  I installed eight 4T
drives in each and use them as ESXi servers and NASs.
Thankfully, the days of noisy fans are behind us!

We have sort of hit a point where CPU improvements especially for single threaded code have hit an insurmountable bottleneck. There is a sweet spot for the amount of ram and fast disk.

Yes.  Managing your *time* is now the key to productivity.  If you're the type
that sits and waits for <something> to finish, you will find yourself waiting,
increasingly!  Thankfully it's not as bad as being able to turn the crank just
*twice* in an 8-hour shift...

If you put it onto a UPS and enable all go faster options for the SSD cache write through (risking potential data loss if power is ever lost) you may get some improvement. You would have to decide if the speed gain is worth it to you.
 If you check LT Spice on various CPUs I think you will find it correlates closely with ram speed and single thread performance on CPU related benchmarks (obviously with a bias towards floating point code).
 If you are prepared to risk data loss then another option is using a RAID0 array of identical disks will get you another factor of 2 or 3 if the system is mainly disk bandwidth limited (and it may be if extensive logging of data is occurring during a simulation).

You can opt for RAID10/50/60 to give you a bit more peace of mind (assuming
you have a hardware RAID controller).  Or, just plan on a "do over" if
something craps the bed.  ECC RAM for damn near any significant amount of it!
Or, gobs of RAM configured as a RAMdisk (most modern OSs will effectively do
this for you as a side-effect of their buffering strategies)
But, the biggest win is not using the machine to naively do things when a bit
of planning and common sense would suffice.