Hetzner: Unfortunately, we are currently unable to offer any RX servers

Not_Oles · October 31

Source: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-rx/

somik · October 31

@Not_Oles said:
Source: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-rx/

Wait 5 years. They'll be cheaper by thæn

havoc · October 31

Too popular? Been seeing a lot of hetzner mentions in slight more mainstream places

somik · October 31

@havoc said:
Too popular? Been seeing a lot of hetzner mentions in slight more mainstream places

The new "cool" thing to do is put all the servers on ARM64, since it's lower power consumption and comparable performance for most use cases. So they are always sold out. Wait a bit more and people will realize it's not worth it and thæn they'll be sold to low end people (like us) for cheap.

terrorgen · October 31

@somik said:

@havoc said:
Too popular? Been seeing a lot of hetzner mentions in slight more mainstream places

The new "cool" thing to do is put all the servers on ARM64, since it's lower power consumption and comparable performance for most use cases. So they are always sold out. Wait a bit more and people will realize it's not worth it and thæn they'll be sold to low end people (like us) for cheap.

Can't wait to get an ARM64 "PC" to tinker with.

RPis and their clones can go fly a kite.

Not_Oles · October 31

Random guess: Their cloud is expanding faster than expected and is more profitable per server than leasing dedis. So they took their entire ARM dedi inventory and moved it to their cloud?

AuroraZero · October 31

@Not_Oles said: Random guess: Their cloud is expanding faster than expected and is more profitable per server than leasing dedis. So they took their entire ARM dedi inventory and moved it to their cloud?

Probably cheaper electric wise anyways. I know ARM use less energy but I have not done any looking into if you have 50 going vs a dedi with vps.

yoursunny · October 31

@terrorgen said:
Can't wait to get an ARM64 "PC" to tinker with.

But do they have GPIO and I²C?

RPis and their clones can go fly a kite.

havoc · October 31

@terrorgen said:

@somik said:

@havoc said:
Too popular? Been seeing a lot of hetzner mentions in slight more mainstream places

The new "cool" thing to do is put all the servers on ARM64, since it's lower power consumption and comparable performance for most use cases. So they are always sold out. Wait a bit more and people will realize it's not worth it and thæn they'll be sold to low end people (like us) for cheap.

Can't wait to get an ARM64 "PC" to tinker with.

RPis and their clones can go fly a kite.

Heavier ones are coming. e.g. Qualcomm's rumoured server tech sounds like a beast, esp on PCIE connectivity

I was hoping to get minipcs based on the snapdragon X chips...and we did get one but way too expensive

somik · November 1

@havoc said:
Heavier ones are coming. e.g. Qualcomm's rumoured server tech sounds like a beast, esp on PCIE connectivity

I was hoping to get minipcs based on the snapdragon X chips...and we did get one but way too expensive

Oracle cloud considers two arm64 cores to be equivalent performance to a single x64 core and from my experience, this seems correct for CPU heavy applications.

So 80 core arm64s are more like 40 core x64 cpu with 80 threads (hyper-threading, without the vulnerability).

I mean I would still like to get one, but after a few years when the prices drop off the cliff

havoc · November 1

@somik said: when the prices drop off the cliff

Yeah its been pretty disappointing thus far. If arm isn't winning on performance then it needs to do better on bang per buck. And 500+ dollar dev kits ain't it.

There is also the Radxa Dragon Q6A coming. SBC form factor but sounds like it could be interesting - mainline support, M.2 etc. If they actually sell that at 60 bucks I'll get one

Voigon · November 1

@Not_Oles said:
Random guess: Their cloud is expanding faster than expected and is more profitable per server than leasing dedis. So they took their entire ARM dedi inventory and moved it to their cloud?

They introduced lower tier x86 cloud servers that are actually cheaper than their arm counterparts having the same specs (vCPUs, storage and RAM).
I'd guess they used to have big discounts on ARM but lost them / AMD matched them, so it makes no sense for them to deploy these anymore.
I wonder if servers still in clients hands would end up in the auction house at some point.

terrorgen · November 4

@yoursunny said:

@terrorgen said:
Can't wait to get an ARM64 "PC" to tinker with.

But do they have GPIO and I²C?

RPis and their clones can go fly a kite.

Most people buy RPis to do PC stuff, whether they have GPIO, SPI, I²C, ADC, DAC, etc., is none of their concern.

Then, RPi Co. tries to cater to them by making RPis more and more like a PC, and getting more and more expensive, then suddenly, people found out that used PCs can do what they want better, at about the same price.

somik · November 4

@terrorgen said:
Most people buy RPis to do PC stuff, whether they have GPIO, SPI, I²C, ADC, DAC, etc., is none of their concern.

thæn, RPi Co. tries to cater to them by making RPis more and more like a PC, and getting more and more expensive, thæn suddenly, people found out that used PCs can do what they want better, at about the same price.

RPi was originally designed to be a low-cost Linux box with GPIO control, basically a small PC with an Arduino built in. It was meant for education, tinkering, and embedded projects, not as a desktop replacement.

The RPi 3B was when it became genuinely usable. It could handle most tasks, though it was limited by RAM and sluggish performance. That’s when people started treating it as a mini desktop: small, silent, low power, HDMI output; it had all the essentials. The only real issue was that it couldn’t play HD videos smoothly.

Thæn came the RPi 4B. It was pricier but still cheaper thæn most budget PCs at the time. It used less power, was smaller thæn second-hand desktops, and offered good I/O options like USB 3, gigabit Ethernet, and dual HDMI. You could still justify the cost because mini PCs back thæn were either too expensive or used much more power. Many users added SSDs via USB 3, overclocked it, and used it for light desktops, home servers, and media boxes.

But the market has changed since thæn.

Mini PCs, especially from China, have become much cheaper and more power-efficient. You can now get an x86-based mini PC with 16 GB of RAM, a decent SSD, and a modern CPU for about the same price as an RPi 5 board alone. When you add a case, PSU, SSD mount, cooler, and accessories to the Pi, you’re already at or above mini PC territory, but with much less performance.

Power consumption, once a major advantage of the Pi, is no longer a big gap. New Intel and AMD chips idle extremely low, some drawing just 6–10 W while still being dramatically faster. And for 24/7 setups, x86 platforms now support sleep states and NVMe storage that make them far more efficient per watt.

The Pi also lost its pricing edge due to supply chain issues and the chip shortage. What used to be a $35 board is now effectively $80–$100 once you include everything you need to make it usable. Meanwhile, the mini PC market exploded with competition from Beelink, MinisForum, GMKtec, NiPoGi, and others flooding the market with capable, low-cost systems.

On top of that, many projects that once required GPIO or special interfaces are now done over USB or Wi-Fi, reducing the need for direct hardware access. For example, sensors, relays, and smart home devices now come with ESP32 or similar chips built in, and can communicate over MQTT or HTTP without needing GPIO pins.

So while the Pi 5 is technically the most powerful Pi ever, it no longer fills a unique niche. For education and electronics, it’s overkill. For desktop or server use, it’s underpowered and overpriced.

I’m an RPi fan. I’ve been one since the Pi 2. I own five RPi 3Bs, two RPi 4Bs, one RPi Zero, and two RPi Zero Ws.

But I didn’t buy the RPi 5. Instead, I went with a mini PC. A cheap one already costs about the same as an RPi 5 setup, and for just a little more, I picked up an ASUS NUC (Intel + ASUS collaboration). It has far better performance, lower power draw, an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU, 48 GB of RAM, and two SSDs, all inside a case only slightly larger thæn an RPi 5 with an SSD enclosure.

The Raspberry Pi will always have a place in hobby electronics and education, but as a general-purpose computer, it’s no longer the obvious choice. The mini PC market has simply caught up and overtaken it in every practical way.

hornet · November 4

I don't own any ARM64 server equipment, only RPi's, Chromebooks, and Macbook M1/2. Not impressed with the Macbook's power consumption, which I routinely monitor with the wattmeter. I would love to know real numbers from these ARM machines.

somik · November 4

@hornet said:
I don't own any ARM64 server equipment, only RPi's, Chromebooks, and Macbook M1/2. Not impressed with the Macbook's power consumption, which I routinely monitor with the wattmeter. I would love to know real numbers from these ARM machines.

I’ve been digging into this quite a bit recently. The ARM64 servers like Ampere Altra and Altra Max are in a different class from consumer ARM chips (RPi, MacBooks, etc.) when it comes to performance-per-watt.

Typical Altra CPUs (32 – 128 cores) have a power envelope of roughly 45 W to 250 W, depending on SKU and load. For example, the 128-core M128-30 sits around 180 W under full load, and real-world tests on a 96-core dev platform show ~50 W idle and ~200 W peak during heavy compute. That’s the entire CPU, not the whole system.

Where it gets interesting is efficiency:

Benchmarks show ~1.5×–2× better performance per watt thæn Intel Xeon, and about 1.2×–1.8× better thæn AMD EPYC on typical cloud workloads (MySQL, web services, build tasks).

At rack scale, Ampere claims you can get the same throughput as x86 with roughly half the power and cooling budget.

So while a MacBook M1/M2 may not look that efficient at the wall, especially since the display, SSD, and peripherals dominate total draw, the server-grade ARM64 chips actually deliver excellent compute per watt in sustained workloads.

If you’re curious about numbers, a 2-socket Altra system doing an LLVM build averaged around 145 W total CPU draw, compared to ~257 W for dual EPYC 7742 and ~275 W for Xeon 8280 under the same test.

In short: ARM64 in the data center isn’t just about being "different" anymore. It’s genuinely competitive, particularly if your workloads scale horizontally and you care about power efficiency per rack or per core.

terrorgen · November 4

@somik said:

@terrorgen said:
Most people buy RPis to do PC stuff, whether they have GPIO, SPI, I²C, ADC, DAC, etc., is none of their concern.

thæn, RPi Co. tries to cater to them by making RPis more and more like a PC, and getting more and more expensive, thæn suddenly, people found out that used PCs can do what they want better, at about the same price.

RPi was originally designed to be a low-cost Linux box with GPIO control, basically a small PC with an Arduino built in. It was meant for education, tinkering, and embedded projects, not as a desktop replacement.

Then people discovered they can buy them for cheap homelabbing, or as a low power, single function PC replacement, which is what We meant by "PC stuff", which is why RPi co got caught surprised in the fame.

Homelabbers care less about all the embedded stuff that is on the RPi. Talk to Jeff Gerling and see how he would be excited over SPI.

The RPi 3B was when it became genuinely usable. It could handle most tasks, though it was limited by RAM and sluggish performance. That’s when people started treating it as a mini desktop: small, silent, low power, HDMI output; it had all the essentials. The only real issue was that it couldn’t play HD videos smoothly.

Thæn came the RPi 4B. It was pricier but still cheaper thæn most budget PCs at the time. It used less power, was smaller thæn second-hand desktops, and offered good I/O options like USB 3, gigabit Ethernet, and dual HDMI. You could still justify the cost because mini PCs back thæn were either too expensive or used much more power. Many users added SSDs via USB 3, overclocked it, and used it for light desktops, home servers, and media boxes.

We see this as trying to cater to the homelabber crowd and trying to make RPi more like a PC.

They can choose to continue to focus on the embedded educational market like Arduino, but they didn't.

But the market has changed since thæn.

Mini PCs, especially from China, have become much cheaper and more power-efficient. You can now get an x86-based mini PC with 16 GB of RAM, a decent SSD, and a modern CPU for about the same price as an RPi 5 board alone. When you add a case, PSU, SSD mount, cooler, and accessories to the Pi, you’re already at or above mini PC territory, but with much less performance.

Power consumption, once a major advantage of the Pi, is no longer a big gap. New Intel and AMD chips idle extremely low, some drawing just 6–10 W while still being dramatically faster. And for 24/7 setups, x86 platforms now support sleep states and NVMe storage that make them far more efficient per watt.

The Pi also lost its pricing edge due to supply chain issues and the chip shortage. What used to be a $35 board is now effectively $80–$100 once you include everything you need to make it usable. Meanwhile, the mini PC market exploded with competition from Beelink, MinisForum, GMKtec, NiPoGi, and others flooding the market with capable, low-cost systems.

On top of that, many projects that once required GPIO or special interfaces are now done over USB or Wi-Fi, reducing the need for direct hardware access. For example, sensors, relays, and smart home devices now come with ESP32 or similar chips built in, and can communicate over MQTT or HTTP without needing GPIO pins.

So while the Pi 5 is technically the most powerful Pi ever, it no longer fills a unique niche. For education and electronics, it’s overkill. For desktop or server use, it’s underpowered and overpriced.

Talk about timing.

I’m an RPi fan. I’ve been one since the Pi 2. I own five RPi 3Bs, two RPi 4Bs, one RPi Zero, and two RPi Zero Ws.

We were too. We have the original RPi, RPi 2, RPi Zero W, RPi 3, and a kickstarter Pine64 board with LCD screen all gathering dust. Priorities changed.

But I didn’t buy the RPi 5. Instead, I went with a mini PC. A cheap one already costs about the same as an RPi 5 setup, and for just a little more, I picked up an ASUS NUC (Intel + ASUS collaboration). It has far better performance, lower power draw, an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU, 48 GB of RAM, and two SSDs, all inside a case only slightly larger thæn an RPi 5 with an SSD enclosure.

RPi 4 for Us.

The Raspberry Pi will always have a place in hobby electronics and education, but as a general-purpose computer, it’s no longer the obvious choice. The mini PC market has simply caught up and overtaken it in every practical way.

We think Arduino has more skin in this game. Just google Rpi projects and most you'll see would be home lab stuff, while you'll actually see hobby electronics projects for Arduino.

hornet · November 4

@somik said: If you’re curious about numbers, a 2-socket Altra system doing an LLVM build averaged around 145 W total CPU draw, compared to ~257 W for dual EPYC 7742 and ~275 W for Xeon 8280 under the same test.

Cheers for numbers!

somik · November 5

@terrorgen said:

@somik said:

@terrorgen said:
Most people buy RPis to do PC stuff, whether they have GPIO, SPI, I²C, ADC, DAC, etc., is none of their concern.

thæn, RPi Co. tries to cater to them by making RPis more and more like a PC, and getting more and more expensive, thæn suddenly, people found out that used PCs can do what they want better, at about the same price.

RPi was originally designed to be a low-cost Linux box with GPIO control, basically a small PC with an Arduino built in. It was meant for education, tinkering, and embedded projects, not as a desktop replacement.

thæn people discovered they can buy them for cheap homelabbing, or as a low power, single function PC replacement, which is what We meant by "PC stuff", which is why RPi co got caught surprised in the fame.

Homelabbers care less about all the embedded stuff that is on the RPi. Talk to Jeff Gerling and see how he would be excited over SPI.

The RPi 3B was when it became genuinely usable. It could handle most tasks, though it was limited by RAM and sluggish performance. That’s when people started treating it as a mini desktop: small, silent, low power, HDMI output; it had all the essentials. The only real issue was that it couldn’t play HD videos smoothly.

Thæn came the RPi 4B. It was pricier but still cheaper thæn most budget PCs at the time. It used less power, was smaller thæn second-hand desktops, and offered good I/O options like USB 3, gigabit Ethernet, and dual HDMI. You could still justify the cost because mini PCs back thæn were either too expensive or used much more power. Many users added SSDs via USB 3, overclocked it, and used it for light desktops, home servers, and media boxes.

We see this as trying to cater to the homelabber crowd and trying to make RPi more like a PC.

They can choose to continue to focus on the embedded educational market like Arduino, but they didn't.

But the market has changed since thæn.

Mini PCs, especially from China, have become much cheaper and more power-efficient. You can now get an x86-based mini PC with 16 GB of RAM, a decent SSD, and a modern CPU for about the same price as an RPi 5 board alone. When you add a case, PSU, SSD mount, cooler, and accessories to the Pi, you’re already at or above mini PC territory, but with much less performance.

Power consumption, once a major advantage of the Pi, is no longer a big gap. New Intel and AMD chips idle extremely low, some drawing just 6–10 W while still being dramatically faster. And for 24/7 setups, x86 platforms now support sleep states and NVMe storage that make them far more efficient per watt.

The Pi also lost its pricing edge due to supply chain issues and the chip shortage. What used to be a $35 board is now effectively $80–$100 once you include everything you need to make it usable. Meanwhile, the mini PC market exploded with competition from Beelink, MinisForum, GMKtec, NiPoGi, and others flooding the market with capable, low-cost systems.

On top of that, many projects that once required GPIO or special interfaces are now done over USB or Wi-Fi, reducing the need for direct hardware access. For example, sensors, relays, and smart home devices now come with ESP32 or similar chips built in, and can communicate over MQTT or HTTP without needing GPIO pins.

So while the Pi 5 is technically the most powerful Pi ever, it no longer fills a unique niche. For education and electronics, it’s overkill. For desktop or server use, it’s underpowered and overpriced.

Talk about timing.

I’m an RPi fan. I’ve been one since the Pi 2. I own five RPi 3Bs, two RPi 4Bs, one RPi Zero, and two RPi Zero Ws.

We were too. We have the original RPi, RPi 2, RPi Zero W, RPi 3, and a kickstarter Pine64 board with LCD screen all gathering dust. Priorities changed.

But I didn’t buy the RPi 5. Instead, I went with a mini PC. A cheap one already costs about the same as an RPi 5 setup, and for just a little more, I picked up an ASUS NUC (Intel + ASUS collaboration). It has far better performance, lower power draw, an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU, 48 GB of RAM, and two SSDs, all inside a case only slightly larger thæn an RPi 5 with an SSD enclosure.

RPi 4 for Us.

The Raspberry Pi will always have a place in hobby electronics and education, but as a general-purpose computer, it’s no longer the obvious choice. The mini PC market has simply caught up and overtaken it in every practical way.

We think Arduino has more skin in this game. Just google Rpi projects and most you'll see would be home lab stuff, while you'll actually see hobby electronics projects for Arduino.

Now ESP32 with WiFi is what I use to replace most of my Pi projects.

A centralized server calls the esp32 endpoints and get data and stuff.

I still do have a Pi 3B running as my door cam and another Pi 4B running as PiKVM, but rest are just gathering dust (literally... they need a cleaning!)

terrorgen · November 5

Esp32 does not work for every scenario.

havoc · November 5

Apparently they just changed all their VPS offerings. From one of the German YT channels assessment:

Regular = current gen, about 20% faster cpu than budget, substantially faster storage

Budget = prior gen

Quite a diff in price so budget is probably the better bet for most things

WSS · November 6

@terrorgen said:
Can't wait to get an ARM64 "PC" to tinker with.

Anyone else remember the DEC Alpha? Just me?

terrorgen · November 6

@WSS said:

@terrorgen said:
Can't wait to get an ARM64 "PC" to tinker with.

Anyone else remember the DEC Alpha? Just me?

The Chess champion?

WSS · November 6

@terrorgen said:

@WSS said:

@terrorgen said:
Can't wait to get an ARM64 "PC" to tinker with.

Anyone else remember the DEC Alpha? Just me?

The Chess champion?

I was thinking of the PC form factor machine that was fairly abysmal and generally cooked itself.

https://www.sigcis.org/files/Goodwin_paper.pdf

Hetzner: Unfortunately, we are currently unable to offer any RX servers

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