Maybe go to a casino if you like gambling. Even if you would pay me the list price and mailing costs, I would not buy such an old platform architecture. Especially if I look at my power consumption measurements. Even at Pi2B initial release, I questioned its HW architecture. I bought Bananapi's instead. Although just 2x Cortex-A9 and not 4x Cortex-A7, it has much more interesting components, like a PMIC that can also charge 3.7V LiPo cell (and run from it). GbE integrated. Seamless switch between AC power and battery, very handy to keep things running. And also a SATA connector although that port is un-powered if running from battery. I remember it costed 10 Euros more than the Raspberry Pi1 lying next to it in the shop (Conrad Electronics in Germany). I still use it every now and then, it logs various PMU numbers into InfluxDB:Anyone willing to take a chance at Digikey?
And as indicated already, if you just need some computer and a lot of (potential) computer power per Watt and per dollar, modern 8nm SoCs with big-LITTLE and all I/O on-SoC are just a better buy. I did some more measurements and actually due to some issue with my Pi5 PSU (does not want to flip to >5V under certain circumstance), I figured out that my NanoPi-R6C idles at 1.10W, that is with GbE link and NVMe removed, so running from its onboard eMMC. Maybe if I force 100 or 10 Mbps (and half duplex) I get it below 1W. With NVMe inserted it was 1.53W. Simple things like running btop via ssh keeps it at those low levels as that is just peanuts for even only the Cortex-A55's (the Cortex-A76's stay idle). Simple useless test like pigz < /dev/mmcblk1 > /dev/null peaks at 8W. So that means easy to handle via the basic/older 12W active PoE. Useful things like compiling a mainline kernel and generating compressed OS images also run well (fanless, 1 hour). Forget that on some Cortex-A53 platform running from SD-card.
If no-one else comes up with v1.1 or v1.3 measurements, then this 'because it is low-power' reason is just a fairy tail, at least for me. If you want to save power (and maybe extent battery life / runtime), see if sleep or standby are possible. That is what smartphones do, nothing magic or new. I haven't seen any ARM board (cheap SBC's, not Apple M1 etc) that can do that. Maybe some Marvell based SoC (for NAS AFAIK). Or I maybe recent Qualcomm based SBC's, they should know how to do it.
Statistics: Posted by redvli — Sat Dec 06, 2025 9:43 am