I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster • Hacker News Board

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#41

Post by Our_Benefactors » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 3:11 PM UTC

leptons wrote: post #19

xnx wrote: post #8

Fun project. Was the author hoping for cost effective performance?! I assumed this was a novelty, like building a RAID array out of floppy drives.

A lot of people don't understand the performance limits of the Raspberry Pi. It's a great little platform for some things, but it isn't really fit for half the use cases I've seen.

This was my impression as well, the bit about GPU incompatibility with llama.cpp made me think he was in over his head.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#42

Post by phoronixrly » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 3:11 PM UTC

aprdm wrote: post #27

phoronixrly wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Was it a learning experience? Also no. The guy's a youtuber On the other hand, will this make him 100+k views? Yes. It's bait - the perfect combo to attract both the AI crowd and the 'homelab' enthusiasts (of which the bulk are yet to find any use for their raspberry devices)...

He is not a YouTuber. And even if he was - what's the problem ? Jeff has many useful OSS software used by many companies around the world daily - including mine. What have you created ?

> What have you created ?

Nothing that is not AGPL-licensed, so you and your company haven't taken advantage of it.

I am not sure how this relates to my comment though.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#43

Post by hn_throw_250915 » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 3:11 PM UTC

I read through it and it’s amusing but along with the title being something I’d receive in email from a newsletter mailing list I’ve never subscribed to (hoping it has an unsubscribe link at the bottom), there’s nothing really of hacker curiosity here to keep me hooked. It’s shallow and appeals to some LCD “I did the thing with the stuff and the results will shock you because of how obvious they are now click here” mentality. Vainposting at its most average. The Mac restoration video was somewhat easier to sit through if only because the picture quality beats out a handful of other YT videos doing the exactly same thing as I’m holding back a jaw grating wince of watching someone butchering a board with poor knowledge of soldering iron practice, so YMMV? Back to hackaday for me I think. I’m not here to read submarine resumes of people applying to work at Linus Tech Tips.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#44

Post by verdverm » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 3:11 PM UTC

montebicyclelo wrote: post #39

bunderbunder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost effective way to do it is in the cloud. Because there's a very good chance you'll learn everything you intended to learn and then get bored with it long before your cloud compute bill reaches the price of a desktop with even fairly modest specs for this purpose.

Yeah... Looks like can get about $1/hr for 10 small VMs, ($0.10 per VM). So for $3000, that's 3000 hours, or 125 days, (if just wastefully leave them on all the time, instead of turning them on when needed). Say you wanted to play around for a couple of hours, that's like.. $3. (That's assuming there's no bonus for joining / free tier, too.)

You can rent a beefy vm with an H100 for $1.50 / hr

I regularly rent this for a few hours at a time for learning and prototyping

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#45

Post by vel0city » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 3:12 PM UTC

aprdm wrote: post #27

phoronixrly wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Was it a learning experience? Also no. The guy's a youtuber On the other hand, will this make him 100+k views? Yes. It's bait - the perfect combo to attract both the AI crowd and the 'homelab' enthusiasts (of which the bulk are yet to find any use for their raspberry devices)...

He is not a YouTuber. And even if he was - what's the problem ? Jeff has many useful OSS software used by many companies around the world daily - including mine. What have you created ?

He may also be a good OSS contributor and writer, but he is also a Youtuber. Over 500 videos posted, 175M views, nearly a million subscribers.

Not that its a problem, I don't see why it would inherently be a negative thing. Dude seems to make some good content across a lot of different mediums. Cheers to Jeff.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#46

Post by sebastiansm » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 3:12 PM UTC

Almondsetat wrote: post #33

bunderbunder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost effective way to do it is in the cloud. Because there's a very good chance you'll learn everything you intended to learn and then get bored with it long before your cloud compute bill reaches the price of a desktop with even fairly modest specs for this purpose.

I can get a Xeon E5-2690V4 with 28 threads and 64GB of RAM for about $150. If you need cores and memory to make a lot of VMs you can do it extremely cheaply

On Aliexpress those Xeon+mobo+ram kits are really cheap.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#47

Post by vlovich123 » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 3:12 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #17

I thought the conclusion should have been obvious: A cluster of Raspberry Pi units is an expensive nerd indulgence for fun, not an actual pathway to high performance compute. I don’t know if anyone building a Pi cluster actually goes into it thinking it’s going to be a cost effective endeavor, do they? Maybe this is just YouTube-style headline writing spilling over to the blog for the clicks. If your goal is to play…

I’d say it’s inconclusive. For traditional compute it wins on power and cost (it’ll always lose on space). The inference is noted to not be able to use the GPU due to llama.cpp’s vulkan backend AND that clustering software in llama.cpp is bad. I’d say it’s probably still going to be worse for AI but it’s inconclusive where it could be due to the software immaturity (ie not worth it today but could be with better software)

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#48

Post by wltr » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 3:12 PM UTC

phoronixrly wrote: post #9

fidotron wrote: post #3

If Pi Clusters were actually cost competitive for performance there would be data centres full of them.

If they were cost competitive for ... anything at all really...

Well I have a Pi as a home server, and it’s very energy efficient, while doing what I want. Since I don’t need latest and greatest (I don’t see any difference with a modern PC for my use case), it’s very competitive for me. No need for any cooling is bonus.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#49

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 3:12 PM UTC

Almondsetat wrote: post #33

bunderbunder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost effective way to do it is in the cloud. Because there's a very good chance you'll learn everything you intended to learn and then get bored with it long before your cloud compute bill reaches the price of a desktop with even fairly modest specs for this purpose.

I can get a Xeon E5-2690V4 with 28 threads and 64GB of RAM for about $150. If you need cores and memory to make a lot of VMs you can do it extremely cheaply

[deleted]

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#50

Post by nsxwolf » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 3:13 PM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #20

Aurornis wrote: post #17

I thought the conclusion should have been obvious: A cluster of Raspberry Pi units is an expensive nerd indulgence for fun, not an actual pathway to high performance compute. I don’t know if anyone building a Pi cluster actually goes into it thinking it’s going to be a cost effective endeavor, do they? Maybe this is just YouTube-style headline writing spilling over to the blog for the clicks. If your goal is to play…

The cost effective way to do it is in the cloud. Because there's a very good chance you'll learn everything you intended to learn and then get bored with it long before your cloud compute bill reaches the price of a desktop with even fairly modest specs for this purpose.

That isn’t fun. I have a TI-99/4A in my office hooked up to a raspberry pi so it can use the internet. Why? Because it’s fun. I like to touch and see the things even though it’s all so silly.