Pi 5 at 90 days: the numbers
312 PRs reviewed. 1,840 doc Q&A questions answered. 12,612 inbox messages classified. One reboot, one OOM kill. Total electricity cost: €3.59 over three months. The article is live now: Raspberry Pi 5 — 90 days of real-world benchmarks. The headline finding is that the Pi is genuinely useful inside a narrow band — and that band is narrower than tutorials usually admit.
Pi 5 vs Intel NUC 13
We added the head-to-head this week. Crossover point is around 7B model size. Below that, the Pi is competitive on tokens-per-watt-hour. Above it, the NUC wins comfortably. Both still lose to the Mac Mini M4 on most metrics — see the GPU-vs-CPU benchmark dropping next week for the full picture.
One reader question
From a reader: 'why does your Pi only run 7B at 4 tok/s when GitHub issues claim 8?' Answer: most published numbers are best-case under empty cache, no other process running, optimal context length. Our 4 tok/s figure is sustained under realistic conditions with a long agent system prompt. The gap is real and worth knowing.
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