Here is the thing, I have 4 RPi’s of different generations (all the way from Zero W to 4B 4GB) that I use to host services at home for personal use.
Lately, I have realized I am running out of RAM to host more services, not to mention not enough switch ports to connect to.
Now I know the obvious solution is to get a more powerful setup (maybe a thin client) but electricity isn’t cheap and I am not particularly in the best shape financially speaking to shell out $300+ on a decent client to host my services.
Any suggestions?
There’s a big shift happening right now, you’re right on that.
Traditionally, ARM is not as capable in solving complex issues, but more efficient.
That’s why it has always been used on smartphones for example. You want a lot of battery and don’t need to do highly complex stuff on that, that’s what you have your PC for.
The big focus in the last years has always been to top the competitor in terms of performance, and only right now, people begin to question if the computing power they have right now isn’t enough and if they rather wouldn’t like to have a device that’s more efficient.
The tradeoff is, you’re more limited to this specific architecture. Apple solved this by making a compatibility layer for x86 apps, but that of course comes with a performance hit.
I’m no expert in that topic tho, so take all I said with a lil grain of salt.
Right now, I think you’re better off with x86, because your server will definitely run on some sort of Linux, and we don’t have any compatibility layer or something like that yet.