Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi?

Unless you need the features on the Pi's 40-pin GPIO connector or very low power consumption a mini PC is a much better bet for general compute.

As the article shows, even power consumption can be debatable. If you're looking to get a certain amount of work done, the Intel mini PC can do it faster expending less power thanks to the smaller transistor size it uses. Maybe there are scenarios where continuous idle power is more important and the RPi still wins (there's no idle power graph in the article) but even if you're power-constrained, the Pi isn't the best choice anymore.

The GPIO header and community remain a solid reason to still opt for the Pi, but the age of "raspberry pi as a cheap home server" is pretty much over, thanks to Intel and AMD slowly watching up to ARM.

rpi 5 is _not_ a low power device, or at least not noticeably lower power than atom systems.

it was over as soon as the Pi went out of stock and unit price skyrocketed since 2020.

Note that the Odroid H3 with an Intel N5105 can do less than 2W< idle, which is competitive with the RPI5. The next generation H4 is even more efficient.

I think I mostly agree. To me, the Pi Zero is the real product these days. The regular Pi models are too expensive and more powerful than they need to be. The Zero is more in line with the original concept in my opinion.

The Pi 5 isn’t very low power at full tilt, but it’s much slower than any of the x86 SBCs from the last few years.

There are at least two SBCs that have N100s and an RP2350 or 2040 onboard that can do you gpio, and at least one that has native GPIO. I have a Radxa X4 and it runs Arch great (only downside is the crappy stock cooler, no cases, and the unfortunate Pi B form factor).