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From: Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Raspberry Pi5 versus other cheap Intel based boxes for general
 computing
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2024 10:02:06 +0100
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On 03/04/2024 18:37, john larkin wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Apr 2024 10:24:00 +0100, Martin Brown
> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
> 
>> On 03/04/2024 06:21, Jan Panteltje wrote:
>>>
>>> What somone learned when he replaced a cheap Pi 5 PC with a no-name Amazon mini desktop
>>>    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/what-i-learned-when-i-replaced-my-cheap-pi-5-pc-with-a-no-name-amazon-mini-desktop/
>>>
>>> All that said, I post this from a Pi4 8GB, it is sometimes really slow,
>>> but I like and use the GPIO port.
>>
>> I was quite surprised how sprightly my Pi 5 was. I opted for 8GB more
>> expensive entirely passive cooling so that it can be used as an
>> entertainment streaming system when not being used for other things.
>> (whole thing cost about £120 and is the size of a bar of soap)
>>
>> In part I got it for the portability and free Mathematica license that
>> comes with it. I haven't found the Debian environment too tiresome
>> despite being a Windows user with a smidgeon of Ubuntu and Android.
>>
>> I reckon its performance single tasking isn't far off the venerable
>> i7-3770 from a decade or so back (and still pretty capable today).
> 
> Can it run LT Spice? I spend too much time running Spice.

I haven't tried it on LT Spice but it seems to be able to run any 
floating point code that will compile on it so I don't see why not. It 
can also drive full QD displays natively at MPEG playback video speeds.

The main weakness as default built is that if you are careless about how 
you use it you can run out of wear cycles on the sD holding the OS and 
swap file! I know someone who did just that...

> My new big-box Windows machines, monster CPU and lots of ram and SSDs,
> are disappointing because they only run sims about 2x as fast as my
> old Win7 machines.

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.

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.  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).

-- 
Martin Brown