Side-by-side
| Axis | Raspberry Pi 5 | Intel NUC 13 |
|---|---|---|
| Setup | Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm flash, Docker, Hermes Agent: 60-90 minutes from box to running agent. Bring your own SD card or NVMe HAT. | Ubuntu 24.04 LTS install, Docker, Hermes Agent: 45 minutes from box to running agent. Internal NVMe ships with the unit. |
| Security model | ARM Cortex-A76 has Pointer Authentication; useful but not a panacea. No hardware TPM by default. | Intel TXT and TPM 2.0 supported. Intel Boot Guard for verified boot. Hardware-rooted attestation possible. |
| Model support | Small models: about 5 tok/s on 3B models and about 11 on 1B (Slips project, Ollama, Q4_K_M). No published 7B figure on a Pi 5. | A 7B model fits with room in 32 GB. No published llama.cpp figure for the NUC 13's 13th-gen Intel graphics; on the Vulkan scoreboard, Intel's Core Ultra 100 series writes 8.21 tok/s with a 7B model at Q4_0. |
| Cost | €138 hardware. €4.30/month total cost of ownership including electricity. | €620 hardware. €25/month total cost of ownership including electricity. |
| Ecosystem | Raspberry Pi has the largest single-board-computer community on Earth. Every problem has been solved by someone, somewhere. | Standard x86. Anything that runs on a Linux laptop runs on a NUC. |
| Best for | Edge classification, agent orchestration, small-model workloads. Or anyone learning self-hosted AI cheaply. | Mid-volume self-hosted AI on 7B models, or workloads where you'd otherwise want a laptop minus the screen. |
Verdict
Pi 5 if your workload fits inside 3B. NUC 13 if you need 7B with margin. Both win against a GPU box on idle power and price. Choose by model size, not headline brand.
Notes
- Fit the Pi 5 with a fan: Raspberry Pi throttles its cores from 80 °C and notes that a heatsink or small fan reduces throttling.
- The NUC 13's Iris Xe graphics can run llama.cpp through its Vulkan or SYCL backend; with no published figure for this chip, measure before relying on it.
- If you're going to add NVMe, a Mac Mini M4 24 GB is often a better dollar-for-dollar buy than a NUC + storage.
Sources
- Slips project, LLM performance on the Raspberry Pi 5 (read 2026-10-17)
- llama.cpp, Vulkan scoreboard, discussion #10879 (read 2026-10-17)
- Raspberry Pi documentation, frequency management and thermal control (read 2026-10-17)
Going deeper
For the full landscape report including hosting economics, security posture and regulatory context, see the 2026 landscape report. For the OpenClaw-specific history, see the complete OpenClaw timeline.
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