Low energy
I have the new Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB, inside an Argonone Pi 4 Case which I understand is great for cooling. I have dual screens for plenty of display room. These screens display my automatic weather station data, images and animations from Weather Satellite Reception using Eumetcast. I am using Satpy to decode the images and my own programs in Java and Python to display them, also my solar panel and wind turbine output.
I am a longstanding Gentoo enthusiast, so I am running Gentoo on the Pi 4 from https://github.com/ sakaki-/gentoo-on-rpi-64bit (Sakaki’s Github repo and wiki are extremely well documented). I use another of my machines to use distcc cross compiling to help the Pi when it needs updating.
The saving? Well, my old machine was using about 130Wh and it was running 15 hours per day, 365 days of year – that’s not far off €180 per annum. The Pi is running at 2.2Wh, so is using only about €3 per year! That’s a saving of €177, which I think is pretty good. Francis, Ireland
Neil says…
We’d like to think Linux was ahead of the game when it came to using Arm as a desktop platform, now that Apple is switching to Arm for its own desktop processors. As you show, the power savings a RISC architecture can offer are huge, while still offering the same instructions per clock level as Intel or AMD equivalents.
But a computer is more than just the CPU and that’s where many issues for people crop up – the GPU, interfaces, storage access speed, display options and so on are all things we take for granted on the PC platform. With that in mind we’re planning on running a desktop Pi feature and see just how one of our poor writers gets on with using one as their everyday computer.