I see a few appealing reasons to spring for the rpi variants:
- Lower power profile
- In theory no need for noisy fans
- Exploring ARM
Personally, I'm excited for a mobo that let me cluster N different CM4s with an array of SSDs. I like the idea of building a little Kubernetes cluster on a Pi array for the fun of it.
You can build a fanless x64 PC quite easily: 4-core Intel Silvermont/Goldmont or AMD Ryzen Embedded V and R series can be passively cooled. Many of those ITX boards come with a 19V DC-Jack power-in so you can use a laptop power brick and eliminate the PSU fan as well. Fujitsu used to have some nice designs, I think now it's owned by Kontron. Asrock also has a good selection for more retail-oriented products.
Of course you can also passively cool a full-fledged desktop CPU if you want but that's a different category in terms of price and performance so I am not talking about that.
As for power, I have Puma-based x64 4-core boards that idle at 5W and consume 12W at full load (measured at the wall). Goldmont should be similarly efficient. RPi4 is about 7W at load I think. Not a huge difference.
Yeah, you can even go back much further in time if you're not too worried about performance. I've been running a fanless Atom J1900 based mini-PC as a home server for ~8 years nonstop now. It's trivial to build such a system but at least back then the cost was literally 10x to 20x the price of a rPI today. I would guess that even though it's an 8-year old CPU it's probably about 2x as fast as an rPI 4B, and for something that's been chugging along for all this time the cost/depreciation over time vs. a much cheaper rPI isn't really an issue for me.
No doubt x86 can be passively cooled, but presumably that means giving up the competitive price point that the OP mentioned with respect to the chip and mobo?
That carrier board doesn't seem to have a price yet, but if you don't mind buying used (and saving some perfectly capable devices from becoming e-waste at the same time) you can usually get a second-hand thin client for the price of the RPi CM module alone.
It's fun, but even with SSD is going to be slow. I built that for "fun" (without ssds) and an hour later put it to storage and then setup vmware on a spare PC, because it was so slow.
RPi is many things, but the latest generation is anything but low power. It IDLES at 60 degrees celsius, which means it really burns quite a bit of power just sitting there doing nothing.
- Lower power profile
- In theory no need for noisy fans
- Exploring ARM
Personally, I'm excited for a mobo that let me cluster N different CM4s with an array of SSDs. I like the idea of building a little Kubernetes cluster on a Pi array for the fun of it.