Development quotes of the week

If you don't need modern desktop levels of performance then you can get a totally silent Raspberry Pi for $35, which still gets you Linux on a quad-core 64-bit CPU and 1GB RAM and 1080p video support and 3D graphics in under 5 watts, which isn't bad.

I think the problem with expecting Moore's law to give you state-of-the-art-as-of-ten-years-ago performance at low power and low cost, is that even if transistor density is still increasing exponentially, power efficiency largely stopped improving over ten years ago. The most sophisticated modern CPUs have a lot of transistors (which incidentally cancels out the cost-per-transistor savings from Moore's law, so they're still expensive), but they can only use a fraction of those transistors at once else they'd melt, so they can't do much more computation within a given thermal limit than much older chips. If you don't want fans or water cooling or giant heat sinks and heat pipes, your thermal limit will be very low, so performance will inevitably be low. (On the other hand, if you only object to fans, just buy one of those other cooling systems - they'll probably be more expensive and/or less effective, but that's because you're ruling out the cheapest solution.)