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

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#261

Post by throwaway894345 » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 6:51 PM UTC

theodric wrote: post #245

throwaway894345 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does a few rpis cost on a monthly basis?

Depends. At full load? At Irish power prices? Just the Pi, no peripherals, no NVMe? 5 units? €13/mo. Handy: https://700c.dk/?powercalc My Pi CM4 NAS with a PCIe switch, SATA and USB3 controllers, 6 SATA SSDs, 2 VMs, 2 LXC containers, and a Nextcloud snap pretty much sits at 17 watts most of the time, hitting 20 when a lot is being asked of it, and 26-27W at absolute max with all I/O and CPU cores pegged. €3.85/mo if…

> Depends. At full load? At Irish power prices? Just the Pi, no peripherals, no NVMe? 5 units? €13/mo.

Pretty sure most of us aren't running anywhere close to full load 24/7, but whoa, Irish power is expensive. In the central US I pay $0.14/KWh.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#262

Post by barnas2 » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 6:54 PM UTC

alias_neo wrote: post #138

TZubiri wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact, a raspberry pi does not have a built in Real Time Clock with its own battery, so it relies on network clocks to keep the time. Another fun fact, the network module of the pi is actually connected to the USB bus, so there's some overhead as well as a throughput limitation. Fun fact, the Pi does not have a power button, relying on software to shut down cleanly. If you lose access to the machine, it's not poss…

> the raspberry pi is still an amazingly cost effective choice It's really not though. I've been a Pi user and fan since it was first announced, and I have dozens of them, so I'm not hating on RPi here; we did the maths some time back here on HN when something else Pi related came up. If you go for a Pi5 with say 8GB RAM, by the time you factor in an SSD + HAT + PSU + Case + Cooler (+ maybe a uSD), you're actually al…

> SSD + HAT + PSU + Case + Cooler (+ maybe a uSD)

The only 100% required thing on there is some sort of power supply, and an SD card, and I suspect a lot of people have a spare USB-C cable and brick lying around. A cooler is only recommended if you're going to be putting it under sustained CPU load, and they're like $10 on Amazon.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#263

Post by magicalhippo » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 6:55 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...

I picked up several Rpi 4 2GB for $20 each just before covid-19. At that price point they've been quite competitive for small homelab workloads.

The current RPi 5 makes no sense to me in any configuration, given its pricing.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#264

Post by bee_rider » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 7:00 PM UTC

densh wrote: post #238

For anyone interested in playing with distributed systems, I'd really recommend getting a single machine with latest 16-core CPU from AMD and just running 8 virtual machines on it. 8 virtual machines, with 4 hyper threads pinned per machine, and 1/8 of total RAM per machine. Create a network between them virtually within your virtualization software of choice (such as Proxmox). And suddenly you can start playing with…

Tangentially related: I really expected running old MPI programs on stuff like the AMD multi-chip workstation packages to become a bigger thing.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#265

Post by michaelt » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 7:04 PM UTC

Computer0 wrote: post #253

esskay wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats pretty much a given, but what the real takeaway should be from most of the content is that whatever you are doing, these days the answer in all likelihood is not to buy a raspberry pi. It's specs to price just do not add up at all anymore, and it's looking like a pretty damn stagnant place these days.

What if you need ARM? What is the best sub $100 sbc that I am missing? Orange Pi hardware always looks good but I hear a lot of negativity about the software that I don't really experience with Raspbian.

Then you should take a good hard look at older, much cheaper Raspberry Pis.

Then look at Apple’s ARM offerings, and AWS Graviton if you need ARM with raw power.

If you need embedded/GPIO you should consider an Arduino, or clone. If you need GPIOs and Internet connectivity, look at an ESP32. GPIOs, ARM and wired ethernet? Consdier the the STM32H.

Robotics/machine vision applications, needing IO and lots of compute power? Consider a regular PC with an embedded processor on serial or USB. Or nvidia jetson if you want to run CUDA stuff.

And take a good hard look at your assumptions, as mini PCs using the Intel N100 CPU are very competitive with modern Pis.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#266

Post by favorited » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 7:06 PM UTC

LTL_FTC wrote: post #171

mercutio2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your googling gave results that were likely accurate for California 4-5 years ago. My average cost per kWh is about 60 cents. Rates have gone up enormously because the cost of wildfires is falling on ratepayers, not the utility owners. Regulated monopolies are pretty great, aren’t they? Heads I win, tales you lose.

They have definitely increased but not all of California is like this. In the heart of Silicon Valley, Santa Clara, it's about $0.15/kWh. Having Data Centers nearby helps, I suppose.

Santa Clara's energy rates are an outlier among neighboring municipalities, and should not be used as an example of energy cost in the Bay Area. Santa Clara residents are served by city-owned Silicon Valley Power, which has lower rates than PG&E or SVCE, which service almost all of the South Bay.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#267

Post by leakycap » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 7:09 PM UTC

I dipped my toe into cluster computing when rendering a MAXON Cinema 4D project across a lab of ~30 dual G5 Power Macs.

Quickly learned that there is so much more to manage when you split a task up across systems, even when the system (like Cinema 4D) is designed for it.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#268

Post by ssl-3 » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 7:12 PM UTC

maartin0 wrote: post #151

geerlingguy wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the biggest regret; but I've backed 6 Kickstarter projects over the years. Median time to deliver is 1 year. Somehow I've actually gotten every item I backed shipped at some point (which is unexpected). Hardware startups are _hard_, and after interacting with a number of them (usually one or two people with a neat idea in an underserved market), it seems like more than half fail before delivering their first r…

Not completely related, but do you know if hardware kickstarters typically have any IP protection? I'm surprised there haven't been any cases of large companies creating patents for ideas from kickstarter at least that I've seen

One cannot (or at least, one is not supposed to be able to) patent someone else's invention.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#269

Post by nodesocket » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 7:14 PM UTC

I feel like AI is not the right workload for this. I run a 4x node Kubernetes cluster (1x control and 3x workers) and it’s surprising good. While performance is certainly not state of the art by any stretch of the imagination it works great for HomeLab’in. Portainer, Glance, OpenSpeed Test, Semaphore UI, Uptime Kuma, and Home Assistant. Many small and lightweight containers is where a cluster such as this can shine.

Re: I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

#270

Post by dzhiurgis » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 7:19 PM UTC

ComputerGuru wrote: post #198

Guys, don’t take the claim so literally. He’s a successful tech poster. He makes good money showing off his purchases the good money complaining about how expensive they were. But certainly don’t imitate his choices, his economics aren’t your economics!

Yea but Jeff’s videos are refreshing.

A lot of others are stuck in a loop where they essentially review tech for making more youtube videos - render times, colour accuracy, camera resolution, audio fidelity.