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I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

(www.jeffgeerling.com)
468 points speckx | 3 comments | 19 Sep 25 14:28 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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deadbabe ◴[19 Sep 25 15:22 UTC] No.45302653[source]▶
I really don’t understand the hype over raspberry Pi.

It’s an overrated, overhyped little computer. Like ok it’s small I guess but why is it the default that everyone wants to build something new on? Because it’s cheap? Whatever happened to buy once, cry once? Why not just build an actual powerful rig? For your NAS? For your firewalls? For security cameras? For your local AI agents?

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1. jonatron ◴[19 Sep 25 15:35 UTC] No.45302791[source]▶
In the category of SBC's, it's pretty much the only one that has good software support, not outdated images made with a bunch of kernel patches for a specific kernel version.
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2. qhwudbebd ◴[19 Sep 25 16:08 UTC] No.45303277[source]▶
This is certainly the reputation but I'm not sure they deserve it. They've always had the horrible closed-source bootloader with threadx running on the gpu, without a free alternative. At least up to pi4 they weren't bad at linux mainlining, but progress on upstreaming pi5 support has been glacial.

Cf. the various Beagle boards which have mainline linux and u-boot support right from release, together with real open hardware right down to board layouts you can customise. And when you come to manufacture something more than just a dev board, you can actually get the SoC from your normal distributor and drop it on your board - unlike the strange Broadcom SoCs rpi use.

I'm quite a lot more positive about rp2040 and rp2350, where they've at least partially broken free of that Broadcom ball-and-chain.

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3. jonatron ◴[19 Sep 25 20:48 UTC] No.45306377[source]▶
This sort of comment is great - it's good to know if the tech situation changes, which you could call Hacker News