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I get that they're using the Pi in a production environment for small-sized-discrete-hardware hosting, but given the nature of the Pi and it's community, the tone of this article is confusing to me.

The Pi is great for things like DIY HTPC's, kiosk displays, IoT controllers, education, etc... but using it how this service is using it seems wrong--or misused--for some reason. I feel like an offensive stance is being taken against the Pi 4 for not being client production ready, when it seems like the foundation's attitude is if you want to go full client production, use the compute module.




I don't think there's a right and a wrong way to use it. If it works, it works. If it's powerful enough to run a website - by all means, use it.


Isn't it a cellphone chip being misused for DIY HTPC's, kiosk displays, IoT controllers, education, etc... :)

More seriously, perf per watt is king in datacenters, no matter what the source.


If I remember correctly, it's originally a chip for set-top boxes.


The original purpose of the original ARM chip was to drive the Acorn Archimedes desktop computer. While they were aiming to design a power efficient device, the power consumption accidentally turned out to be far lower than intended, which has been a big reason for ARM's continued success in many uses.


The team's design goal was 1 watt, but the chip ended up needing only a tenth of a watt. In fact on the original testbed they forgot to wire up the power lines to the chip, but the processor still worked, appearing to be running on no power at all! It turned out that it needed so little power that it could run on just the leakage from the data lines.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes...


I was talking about the SoC family the Raspberry Pi's have been based on.


I had to dig up why I thought cellphone...

I found it here:

> The 1176JZ(F)-S is the same CPU used in the original iPhone,[23] although at a higher clock rate, and mated with a much faster GPU.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi#Processor

that said, you could probably make statements like "ARM is used in spaceships" or "Broadcom is used in switching hardware" too




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