On Sat, 22 Jul 2017 at 22:06:30 -0700 Rick Moen <[email protected]> wrote:
[...] > And, if you bought your > unit around 2007, you _could_ instead have bought x86_64 as > future-proofing. I bought that PC second-hand (actually, assembled from mostly rummage parts). > On the matter that Adam mentioned about power draw (what the Yanks call > AC power, and the Brits call mains power): When my firm VA Linux > Systems was getting out of the hardware business because of the Dot-Com > market crash, I do recall something from that period: how disappointed was I when VA went out of the HW business before I could buy myself one of their machines! [...] > It needed the very carefully engineered cooling because the pair of > Athlon 760MPs put out tremendous amounts of heat, which of course the > operator also pays for in the shape of electric bills. Let's focus on the advantagges: during winter they allowed you to save on heating! :-) In summertime... well, in Italy one could put his pasta pot on top of the server and save on gas. > Intel followed > the Athlon's example (meaning, releasing CPUs that tremendously > increased power draw). Global warming was not as strong a topic as today. [...] > And, getting back to my point, your Northwood-core Pentium 4 with 3.40 > GHz clock speed has a TDP of 89 Watts -- because the entire P4 line and > several of its successors sucked power at an amazing rate relative to > prior Intel (and AMD) CPUs. PIV fans would brag it sucked so much /less/ power compared to the Itanium's 140W! :-O (or what was Itanium called then) > My Coppermine PIII has a TDP of 20.8 Watts. I was too lazy to switch that one on yesterday, but I do have one of those, too. Nice and cool. And much less prone at throwing up compilation-killer mce-events compared to the PIV. It's the last surviving of a batch of PIIIs I salvaged from my employer's cleanup years ago. It is the first machine I tested Devuan on and it's still running Jessie. [...] > My intended replacement, still under construction using Devuan, will > reduce power cost to a pittance: CompuLab Intense PC w/16GB RAM, > Celeron 847E 1.1 GHz dual-core, pair of mirrored SSDs on eSATA in > external enclosures. I'm not sure of the total draw yet, but think it > will be almost nothing -- thus even more cheap to run (not to mention > silent and ultra-cool). I intend to to something similar. I wanted to go for an ARM machine, however I experienced issues running Java-based applications on one such box (an Odroid U3 from hardkernel.com). Bye, and thank you for bringing up VA-era memories! :-) Alessandro _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
