3 ms·

Are you talking about the Atom line of Intel CPUs? If so, I don't really understand this comment. Atoms are used in all kind of applications where low(ish) pow

Are you talking about the Atom line of Intel CPUs? If so, I don't really understand this comment. Atoms are used in all kind of applications where low(ish) power x86 is required. They even support ECC RAM making them great fit for NAS and embedded servers deployed in the field. They may not shine as a general purpose CPU but they are definitely not ewaste.

PaulHoule 4y ago
There are the netbooks which are e-Waste when they are new, and then there was https://www.theregister.com/2017/02/06/cisco_intel_decline_to_link_product_warning_to_faulty_chip/ https://www.theregister.com/2017/02/06/cisco_intel_decline_t... Any other vendor that had a failing product line would have retired the brand a long time ago and come out with a new name (look at how no small car brand from an American manufacturer ever survives more than a few years.) Instead Intel comes out with all kinds of forgettable "... creek" and "... lake" brands for their quality parts. The process difficulties they are having in particular stretch out the lifecycle of parts like the construction of a nuclear power plant, but the time the "s..t creek" chip is newly available you have been hearing about it for three years and it doesn't sound new it sounds more like "IBM System/360".
- smoldesu 4y ago
  FWIW, I can never remember my CPU's generation numbers as quickly as I remember their codenames. Referring to generally-similar hardware by "Haswell" or "Skylake" is easier than "4000-series" or "6XXX". Just my two cents though.
- nicolaslem 4y ago
  I still don't agree with the e-waste thing. As a student back in 2008, I did all my five years of CS degree on a 11" Atom netbook. Maybe it's the nostalgia talking but these things were awesome. They were super affordable, much smaller than the laptops of the era, ran Linux without trouble, were hackable... so much that using them as Hackintosh was basically the equivalent of a Macbook Air before the Macbook Air even existed. Besides the netbooks, plenty of sysadmins in my circles started their journey by renting small Atom dedicated servers for a few bucks a month from the likes of OVH.
PaulHoule 4y ago
I'll be fair and say that atom devices make much better NAS units than the MIPS and other off-brand CPUS in the 2000-2010 period which frequently did not have the horsepower to do even lightweight file server tasks. I remember finding some of these things provisioned with so little RAM that accessing files at all through Samba would lead to a swapping crisis that would make it take 20 seconds to list a directory, 5 seconds to open a file, etc. Atom-based NAS improve on that.

PaulHoule 4y ago

There are the netbooks which are e-Waste when they are new, and then there was https://www.theregister.com/2017/02/06/cisco_intel_decline_to_link_product_warning_to_faulty_chip/ https://www.theregister.com/2017/02/06/cisco_intel_decline_t... Any other vendor that had a failing product line would have retired the brand a long time ago and come out with a new name (look at how no small car brand from an American manufacturer ever survives more than a few years.) Instead Intel comes out with all kinds of forgettable "... creek" and "... lake" brands for their quality parts. The process difficulties they are having in particular stretch out the lifecycle of parts like the construction of a nuclear power plant, but the time the "s..t creek" chip is newly available you have been hearing about it for three years and it doesn't sound new it sounds more like "IBM System/360".

smoldesu 4y ago
FWIW, I can never remember my CPU's generation numbers as quickly as I remember their codenames. Referring to generally-similar hardware by "Haswell" or "Skylake" is easier than "4000-series" or "6XXX". Just my two cents though.
nicolaslem 4y ago
I still don't agree with the e-waste thing. As a student back in 2008, I did all my five years of CS degree on a 11" Atom netbook. Maybe it's the nostalgia talking but these things were awesome. They were super affordable, much smaller than the laptops of the era, ran Linux without trouble, were hackable... so much that using them as Hackintosh was basically the equivalent of a Macbook Air before the Macbook Air even existed. Besides the netbooks, plenty of sysadmins in my circles started their journey by renting small Atom dedicated servers for a few bucks a month from the likes of OVH.

PaulHoule 4y ago

I'll be fair and say that atom devices make much better NAS units than the MIPS and other off-brand CPUS in the 2000-2010 period which frequently did not have the horsepower to do even lightweight file server tasks. I remember finding some of these things provisioned with so little RAM that accessing files at all through Samba would lead to a swapping crisis that would make it take 20 seconds to list a directory, 5 seconds to open a file, etc. Atom-based NAS improve on that.