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

(www.jeffgeerling.com)
276 points transpute | 28 comments | 04 Jul 25 12:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.494s | source | bottom
1. whywhywhywhy ◴[04 Jul 25 14:03 UTC] No.44464674[source]▶
It's genuinely crazy how much better value an N100 is and how much better it works out of the box than a Pi for anything that is a little server, plex/jellyfin, self hosting project that doesn't need to talk to electronics/GPIO.

Caveat being about my comment is my N100 us used mostly as a Jellyfin server/torrent downloader running windows but has two SSDs inside it and has worked flawlessly for 2 years. Not sure how well it performs under Linux but I've used Pi's a lot previously and this beats it in terms of getting the job done and in price for a similar Pi setup.

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2. sigmoid10 ◴[04 Jul 25 14:20 UTC] No.44464810[source]▶
To be fair it wasn't always like that. I remember a time when you could get a semi-top-of-the-line raspberry model for under 30 bucks. That was peak hobbyist time for me and I still have many of those lying around, but I haven't bought a new one for a long time now. First they went through some weird feature creep, then the pandemic hit with supply chain issues, then inflation, then the IPO... It's nice that the founders got to make bank with something that has immeasurable value for letting people discover modern tech, but somewhere along the line they got completely lost. Looking at the N100 I feel like building something again for the first time in years. It's not as pure as it was back then, but damn it is useful.
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3. comboy ◴[04 Jul 25 14:29 UTC] No.44464889[source]▶
There was maybe a short period of time when RPi offered a decent compute for money if ever. But all of that time it's about the ecosystem and simply being the most popular platform. Any hardware library, you take it and you know somebody tested it on this exact hardware with the same operating system. When doing hardware stuff it can be really painful to debug. You don't want to also be wondering if maybe some pin is handled differently on your box than RPi etc.
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4. geerlingguy ◴[04 Jul 25 14:35 UTC] No.44464937[source]▶
Yeah; honestly if you're going to integrate I2C/UART/SPI, cellular, serial bus stuff, PoE, or anything like that into a project, the Pi (4/5) makes that simple, and almost always painless.

Having well-supported GPIO and documented interfaces is nice, when you want to do anything outside normal 'compute' use cases.

The Pi 4 is still a great option for throwing into random spots for $35 and burning 1-2W of power. The Pi 5 less so, in that common homelab use case.

I wish they made a Pi Zero 2 non-W with an Ethernet port, for $15; that would be the perfect little 'more than microcontroller' endpoint for a lot of things.

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5. venusenvy47 ◴[04 Jul 25 14:42 UTC] No.44464997[source]▶
I found that the mini PCs with the N100 are much more convenient because I don't have to deal with custom OS or packages. I'm not a developer, and wanted the easiest method to get a Linux server running. After struggling with the limitations of the custom builds required for an SBC, I found it so refreshing to be able to install the general Linux distros available for the x86/x64 platforms.
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6. harshitaneja ◴[04 Jul 25 16:01 UTC] No.44465661[source]▶
RPi is a good option if one has less RAM requirements especially if you take into account the quality of the drivers and software support in general.

RPi can be a compelling option if you need lower power draw. It does take some effort to squeeze out power efficiency but if the requirement can't be handled by a microcontroller then it is the most convenient of-the-shelf option.

For everything, RPi isn't a very compelling option. Even for GPIO, during RPi shortage I started experimenting with just using STM32 dev boards connected via USB to a NUC or an old PC and it worked well. But I just prefer to use ESP8266 or ESP32 for those tasks most of the time. Bandwidth and latency of USB communication/wifi to the main device has been low enough for it not to be a concern for me and I recon outside of very specific robotics cases it won't be for most.

CSI port is quite nice though and not many great alternatives.

7. edoceo ◴[04 Jul 25 16:16 UTC] No.44465776{3}[source]▶
Ethernet w/POE
8. tw04 ◴[04 Jul 25 16:41 UTC] No.44465968[source]▶
Depending on what you’re doing, even for gpio. Just use a USB gpio board.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264

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9. chasd00 ◴[04 Jul 25 17:04 UTC] No.44466153[source]▶
man, i couldn't hit the upvote button hard enough. That is a very cool breakout, thank you for the link. I'm already thinkking about that breakout connected to the 16 channel PWM breakout I already have. Now i can play around with servos, and many other things, right from my laptop with all my usual build tools instead of having to power up my pi zero and connect over ssh first. I love Adafruit, they do so many cool things.
10. FirmwareBurner ◴[04 Jul 25 17:41 UTC] No.44466441[source]▶
>I remember a time when you could get a semi-top-of-the-line raspberry model for under 30 bucks.

You still can, but its performance will be dog-slow at PC/web/server tasks compared to an Intel NUC off the used market.

That's why most people who bough those RPis had them collecting dust after a few weeks since you can blink LEDs with an 5$ Arduino/ESP32 too.

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11. mrheosuper ◴[04 Jul 25 18:00 UTC] No.44466599[source]▶
it's the raspberry that becomes bad in value. I feel like their price has never recovered since the hardware shortage during covid.
12. jon_adler ◴[04 Jul 25 18:53 UTC] No.44466967[source]▶
It is also possible to get the best of both worlds. The ODYSSEY features both a Celeron J4125 and RP2040 co-processor. I have an older model and find this combination very handy. I run Proxmox on it and it works very well.

https://www.seeedstudio.com/ODYSSEY-X86J4125800-v2-p-5531.ht...

13. wingworks ◴[04 Jul 25 20:10 UTC] No.44467502[source]▶
I got an old Mac mini 2014 like 5 years ago, 2nd hand, installed Debian on it, and after the first few days smoothing out bugs, it's worked rock solid since. On 24/7. Never heard the fan ever spin up either. Not sure if that's just broken in Debian or the fan just doesn't speed up unless really hot. But either way, seems to not effected it thus far.

I mostly went this route vs Pi because I didn't want the pain of working with ARM. x86 "just works" with 99% of things. Where are a lot of cases with ARM you end up compiling code just to do what you're after. Anything off the popular apps.

Things are better now, but still a risk.

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14. astrostl ◴[04 Jul 25 20:44 UTC] No.44467753[source]▶
I got so dang sick of SD and enclosure fan failures on rPis. Adore my $159-in-2024 Beelink S12 (N100/16GB/512GB).
15. freedomben ◴[04 Jul 25 20:49 UTC] No.44467783[source]▶
This is a very underrated feature of x86/64 platforms. All these ARM boards sound (and can be) so fun, but the level of polish leaves much to be desired when you're tired of tinkering and want the project to be done.
16. puzzlingcaptcha ◴[04 Jul 25 21:09 UTC] No.44467907[source]▶
If you can do without SPI there's also https://www.adafruit.com/product/4471 You can also just get the chip (MCP2221A) in a DIP package and just pluck it in a breadboard. All you need is two bypass caps and two pullup resistors if you need I2C.
17. Nextgrid ◴[04 Jul 25 21:52 UTC] No.44468127{3}[source]▶
> tou can blink LEDs with an 5$ Arduino/ESP32 too.

At the time the RPi came out I don't believe Wi-Fi-enabled microcontrollers were a thing or were as widespread. RPi was the OG low-cost, popular Wi-Fi "microcontroller".

You are right that nowadays a lot of that can easily be done on an ESP32.

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18. chrisfosterelli ◴[04 Jul 25 22:09 UTC] No.44468280[source]▶
Agreed. Especially for a home media server, an underrated element not mentioned in the article is that something like the N150 is going to have intel quicksync for hardware transcoding, and the pi is going to be stuck with software implementations if it needs to transcode something which is going to make a big difference in streaming media performance.
19. ZenoArrow ◴[04 Jul 25 22:09 UTC] No.44468286{3}[source]▶
> I wish they made a Pi Zero 2 non-W with an Ethernet port, for $15; that would be the perfect little 'more than microcontroller' endpoint for a lot of things.

It's not a Raspberry Pi, but this Radxa board is more powerful than a Pi Zero 2 and has the form factor you're looking for. Price isn't that bad either (around $25 for the cheapest model).

https://radxa.com/products/zeros/zero3e/

20. mrbluecoat ◴[04 Jul 25 22:25 UTC] No.44468416[source]▶
Agreed. I spent years begging Linux to boot on Banana Pi's and their cousins.
21. theshrike79 ◴[04 Jul 25 23:17 UTC] No.44468764{4}[source]▶
There were some NRF boards with Wifi IIRC, but Raspi just worked and you could just use Python to do whatever you needed with GPIO instead of messing about with the kinda-sorta C but not quite.
22. renw0rp ◴[04 Jul 25 23:21 UTC] No.44468795{4}[source]▶
Raspberry pi didn't have built in WiFi until raspberry pi 3 in 2016 (of course you could use a usb adapter). I think around similar time esp 8266 (cheap microcontroller with WiFi) started becoming popular
23. Mars008 ◴[05 Jul 25 05:54 UTC] No.44470374[source]▶
N100 more than enough for non-gaming desktop. It can play 8k 24fps 50MB/s x265 video smoothly. Which is impressive because 2080 RTX cannot.
24. wltr ◴[05 Jul 25 06:28 UTC] No.44470516{3}[source]▶
There’s Orange Pi Zero, they are pretty good. I have the very first version from circa 2016, and I like it. The only thing I’d change is to move from 32 bit to 64. But IIRC their very next version is 64 bit. And as of today there are three or four versions. All of which are pretty cheap.
25. wltr ◴[05 Jul 25 06:34 UTC] No.44470548[source]▶
Hey, I thought of getting the same machine recently! What’s the power consumption? And what about things like remote turn on? I have a beefy server that doesn’t work 24/7, but when I need it, I wake-on-LAN it from a Raspberry Pi. What about something similar with Mac minis? And what about power loss, will it turn on back again? I value that a lot from these SBCs.
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26. wingworks ◴[05 Jul 25 07:24 UTC] No.44470753{3}[source]▶
Looking at some old photos from 2018 on idle it takes around 7.7-15W, don't recall what I had running on it at the time. Probably Plex.

Not sure on remote turn on. I've got it on a UPS which usually holds it over any short power cuts. I don't think it auto powers on after extended power cut, but I've also not looked into if it's possible to enable.

Edit, looks like you can enable auto boot: https://www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/vf8cv4/mac_mini_au...

Also, according to this https://wiki.debian.org/WakeOnLan, I checked my Mac, and both Supports Wake-on and Wake-on was "g", so in theory, WoL should work too.

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27. bigfatkitten ◴[05 Jul 25 09:00 UTC] No.44471220[source]▶
The ecosystem (and in the early days, price) is about the only thing they’ve ever had going for them.

They’ve otherwise always been mediocre boards in pretty much every respect. Slow, relatively power hungry, and powered by a set top box SOC that is NDAed out the wazoo.

28. wltr ◴[05 Jul 25 10:20 UTC] No.44471625{4}[source]▶
Thanks for your bits of research!