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With the recent release of the raspberry pi 4, you can now get a model with 4 gigs of ram as opposed to the old 1 gig and quad core 1.5ghz processor as opposed to a quad core 1.2ghz processor. I've never tried building a render farm before but at $55 per 4gig pi model, I'm curious what those of you with actual experience think about its feasibility as an affordable farm node (since you could buy 15 of these for the cost of one good gpu not to mention the cost of the rest of the pc to house the gpu). I seem to recall reading that ram is the biggest concern when rendering large scenes (where insufficient ram causes blender to crash). So as I write this I suppose there is more than one question:

  1. (the original question) Is the Pi 4 a legitimate contender for a low cost farm node given the new specs?
  2. More generally, I have no basis of reference for how complex a scene would need to be to exceed 4 gigs - Can someone provide some insight into this as a realistic or unrealistic challenge?

Thanks in advance for any input!

KmfnA
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  • Hello and welcome. Blender isn't really made to run on ARM, and I don't think Cycles even compiles for that architecture, as far as I know; so you have a major road block there. As it stands this question seems both too broad and highly subjective – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Jun 24 '19 at 16:32
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    https://blender.stackexchange.com/search?q=raspberry+pi –  Jun 24 '19 at 16:37
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    Thanks Duarte! Not sure how I had overlooked the architecture argument, guess I was just more focused on the hardware size and speed. That is unfortunate though it seemed like a nice alternative... oh well, that's how it goes sometimes. – KmfnA Jun 24 '19 at 16:52

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