Indeed. Current testing that measures just the temperature is basically the same as 20 years ago - when we had recent innovations like CPU shutting down the system when overheated instead of just frying itself. For the longest time when thermal throttling was introduced it was also very rudimentary - basically a binary situation between 100% performance or going down to like 25% when overheated with nothing in-between.

With modern CPUs pushing tons of extra watts for sake of marginal performance gains as well as precisely surfing the line of extracting vast majority of possible performance in given conditions it’s just terribly inadequate.

Well, the point of such lists, as well as any testing, should in theory be about judging products on being fit for purpose. What specific metrics you choose, how you weight them and how they are presented are all critically important. Especially if what you search for is not strictly the best possible performance and instead want a product that strikes a good balance between its various functional aspects as well as price.

For coolers you typically see them arranged mostly by temperature they reach under power virus workloads. Which IMHO is just fucking useless in light of how modern CPUs behave. Such metric will struggle in differentiating between multiple coolers that technically cause some thermal throttling as it doesn’t account for how much they actually throttle.

On the other end you have the option to just ignore temperature and instead measure performance impacts on actual workloads. Which is far more relevant to actual use cases and it allows for good differentiation between non-overkill coolers. But the cooler makers might not like that when it shows no difference between a $50 and $300 cooling solution.

Well, if you use it mostly for GPIO, you don’t really need any of that. At the same time though you likely don’t need a Pi 5 (or likely even Pi 4) to begin with as any Pi will do GPIO without problems.

That said the cooling requirements are often quite overstated - outside of niche uses where you actually run at full throttle for sustained periods of time, you don’t really need to care about it. Sure, it will throttle if you run stress-ng for more than few minutes, but so what? If your workload hammers the Pi at 100% of all cores for long time, you are using wrong platform to begin with.

People on regular basis outright hilariously overstate the impact of thermal throttling during normal operation. Thechpowerup did a pretty good experiment with the 7950X.

The big conclusion is that the issue has large impact only on artificial benchmarks that behave more like power virus than actual workload. Heavily parallelised productivity workloads can suffer a bit, but nowhere near enough to justify high end cooling for vast majority of users, especially on CPUs that aren’t strictly top of the line. And gaming is almost hilariously unaffected.

The silly thing is that Pi5, at least currently, tends to idle at basically the same or higher power than your average Intel N100 NUC-like PC. This might change in the near future with firmware upgrades (just like it has changed for Pi 4). Those N100 PCs can be had for ~200€ with SSD, memory etc - ready to go in comparable form factor.

Pi does still make a ton of sense if you keep it rather basic, but equipping it fully with a nice case/cooling, m.2 SSD and proper PSU does bring it within spitting distance of price of basic NUCs. Against those it loses pitifully in performance department (as well as efficiency!) - which you likely cared about at least somewhat if you went out of your way to add performance-related stuff to the Pi to begin with.

Why do EVs need 2 motors? Wouldn’t a transmission be cheaper than another motor?

The EVs don’t need 2 motors for AWD, but as opposed to what you say - a second motor is lighter, cheaper, simpler and much more efficient than adding a long shaft, transfer case and two extra differentials. On top of all that you also get the performance benefits of ability to independently govern the amount of power going to each axle.

Farming equipment for field work is surprisingly hard to electrify. In cars you can have your aerodynamic blob slip through the air almost unimpeded. Farming generally requires plowing stuff through soil and that’s very energy intensive process.

You can also think of it in the way how passenger cars generally use just a small fraction of their max power for vast majority of the time (when they are cruising at set speed). Farm tractors and such tend to work for hours on end at 80%-100% of their rated power. So a moderately sized 100kW tractor will need a 1MWh battery to go through a day of work. That’s basically an engineering impossibility without some extreme compromises. Eventually we will have to figure out something (easily swappable batteries automatically ferried between charging station and the tractor? or something), but right now it’s a huge problem.

There are many more forces at play here rather than just “less demand = lower price”. Starting from the very beginning of the process:

• It’s true that with less demand crude oil would become cheaper - simply because all of that demand could be satisfied by relatively easily extractable deposits of oil. But at the same time those very deposits are controlled by petro states with very strong incentives to keep the prices up as well as means to reduce supply to do so.
• Refining oil is not cheap and requires lots of capital expenses. Running old refineries with no regard for future expansion will be a bit cheaper. But this is also an energy intensive process and economies of scale matter in it a lot - thus there is pretty high price floor for that aspect.
• Distribution network actually has the opposite problem. It’s the tremendous scale of oil infrastructure and consumption that enables it to be very cheap per gallon/liter. With dropping demand those costs will start rising.
• Externalities of burning gas are generally not included in its price, especially in the US. Even EU with is much higher gas taxes doesn’t really come close to equalising its costs to the society. So if a government decides it’s prudent to put the burden of externalities on people burning the gas - its price would rise several times over in US and double or more in EU.

All in all - while in the short term there might be some dip in gas prices, I’m firmly convinced it will be very temporary. In the long run the prices will keep rising.

That doesn’t at all mean there will not be a dotcom bubble burst equivalent in the space. Right now there is a huge torrent of money flowing into it which is in stark contrast to how relatively few revenue streams have materialised and their actual long term financial viability is fuzzy.

Are you trying to build a series hybrid on base of an existing car? This is a difficult proposition: looking at sourcing a generator to attach to car engine also means you kinda got lost and not seeing trees for the forest.

What you need will strongly depend on what your end goal is ultimately. Given how pricey EV conversions are in general, it’s almost certain that you could get there much faster and cheaper by just buying one of the used series hybrids already in the market.