What's the point of Rasperry Pi and other low-power SoC clusters...

What's the point of Rasperry Pi and other low-power SoC clusters? Why wouldn't you just get a multi core server CPU for the same price?

its just a fun hobby

Because you don't get cool clock, Ahmed brownie points with a normal-looking computer

low budget distributed computing testing.

You don't need a point to do something

these. you must live a pretty empty life if you've never built something just because it'd be cool to play with.

What's the point of using a computer? Why wouldn't you just hire someone from India to use a computer for you for 12 cents a week?

This.
And this.

Rpi is cheap, cooler and less power hungry then a cluster of old PCs, also has occupies less physical space. Nobody's using them to mine BTC, it's mostly for experimentation and testing.

>cluster of old PCs
but user you only need one of them to replace your entire RPi cluster

Then how do you do cluster stuffs my love?
It's not about processing power, my laptop might be more powerful that picture in the op. It's cluster Vs cluster comparison, rpi cluster is small, cheap, cool (less power consumption)

what year does a computer have to come from before an rpi is better than it

Better at what? RPi can decode modern video codecs. Any pre-2005 GPU is guaranteed to fail miserably and use 20x more power than the whole RPi.

remember that dell desktop with a pentium 4 you had, around the millennium? pi's current iteration is 1.2 Ghz chip, 1 gig memory, onboard wifi. so it's better than almost anything pre-2000.
also draws about 6 watts.

rpi is just bad speed/$ and all around not useful, there's a ton of cheap arm boards like odroid, hell you can get a recent x64 quad core w/ 16 gb of flash thin client for like $50

vanity

I agree with better boards for similar or better prices but a lot of those other boards don't have to community and support that the rpi does, if Im a noob and get stuck with something on the rpi there's thousands of people who are online who can help, the other boards don't have many people at all, sure there are some but no where near as much as the rpi, rpi has the advantage of being one of the first boards that caught on, now it's everyone's go to apart from the arduino

what applications are there for a pi cluster? Genuinely curious.

it's a soyboy thing

What's up with this new meme? 90% of the time I see it it's not even remotely relevant.

It's a fun project. If you don't get why someone would do something like this, maybe you aren't as into technology as you think you are :^)

If that is the case, then why do I see thread after thread of people asking for projects to do with them? Why buy something if you have no plan for it?

>you can get a recent x64 quad core w/ 16 gb of flash thin client for like $50
link?

If you were writing a program for disturbed computing to be ran on a super computer and wanted to test it cheaply on an arm system and set program didnt need much ram to test a raspberry pi clusters might be alright.

Absolute lies and bullshit, unless you mean out of a niggers van on craigslist

>why do people do thing
"because some people want to do that thing just to say they can"
>yeah but why do OTHER people not know what to do with that thing??

>What's the point of Rasperry Pi and other low-power SoC clusters?
Marketing. That's literally it. Like normies used to with Apple.

wrong

That's what normies said too, followed by shit like "iPads are 4 times as fast as any Samsung"

Well I'm building a cluster and marketing has nothing to do with it, so it can't literally be it.

testing network and distributed systems

you could try adding more if you need more computing power

Yeah, but most of those raspi ripoffs use Allwinner chips, which suck and violate the GPL.

>Why wouldn't you just get a multi core server CPU for the same price?
Can you buy that multi core server CPU in bits until you have as much as you need?

Can you make it and its connected hardware fail one core at a time if something goes wrong other than the commonly installed software, for high availability reasons?

And so on. That is not to say a single powerful x86_64 or a rack full of these isn't the answer in many cases, but in other cases it is not.

The marketing is not about clusters, it's about the Raspberry Pi. They were smart for "pre-packaging" it all and promoting it accordingly on the internet, as a simple, modular unity as opposed to simply a bunch of electronic circuits wired to a board. All the retarded journalists (if you excuse the redundancy) thought they had invented the quantum computer and shilled them, so now they're the "default" of their kind, the first one that pops in almost everyone's mind. Marketing.

Regardless it's not literally the only reason people build SBC clusters.

My four oPi PC cluster generates more than a quarter of the gridcoin my PC does while drawing less than a fifth.

perfect for IoT deployments and end to end enterprise solutions the future is now

Whats the fucking point when you can rent servers for less than 0.01$/hr with ten times more powerful systems.
Also there are providers who offer free trial periods if you are not committed.

There are multiple ways to use these badboys for way more fun projects. If you have limited technology skill and you are stuck with the joys of memorizing fizz buzz then go ahead and build clusters of Pis.

Fun.

see:
>joys of memorizing fizz buzz
have fun then

>What's the point
Not much, it's mostly for fun.
Maybe some domotics.

I know some guys that used it to test the practical aspects the scaling of some databases, ML, and openfoam.
Those made were some pretty good MSc Theses and/or job application stories btw, if you need that sort of thing

That doesn't sound like fun. Building my own cluster and writing my own software for it does though.

>building
did you use a soldering iron?

>build |bild|
>verb (past and past participle built |bilt| ) [ with obj. ]
>construct (something, typically something large) by putting parts or material together over a period of time: the factory was built in 1936.

you got me there friend
have fun with your cluster

> when you can rent servers for less than 0.01$/hr
A year has ~8760 hours, so that's still $131.4/year.

You realize these computers you buy don't fail in a year, and that RPi and the like are power efficient enough that you can run them at $10 or less per year, right?

And of course you have LAN type latencies and bandwidth. And you won't have to look for new hosters whenever the other side "innovatively" changes their pricing model for storage / bw / server hosting again.

Woops, read 0.015 (probably because that's also what I remembered for server costs). Obviously should be $86.7 if it's $0.01.

Even then, the question is still how much they then (over-)charge for storage, port or address usage, and so on.

>rent servers
thanks but i rather want my servers where i can see them physically

Seems to me, user feels that soyboy's primarily deal in things such as rpi clusters. Point is relevant

>Why buy something if you have no plan for it?
Based user

It's one thing to have an intended purpose. It's another to fall for the meme of buying/having a rpi, for the sake of just having one.

There are many great uses of those cheap chinkchips, NONE of them are computation heavy. Get a real CPU for real work.

>no fun allowed

What's a computer?

I dont know, ever since Apple and Facebook made that new fangled terminal with command line only, i dont remember