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> the best part is if the components are reused from consumer devices, they might be dirt cheap Older hardware takes substantially more power to do the same wo
by duskwuff 3y ago
> the best part is if the components are reused from consumer devices, they might be dirt cheap
Older hardware takes substantially more power to do the same work (and more power at idle); in a datacenter environment, this also means more power consumption for cooling. There's a case to be made for keeping old hardware in service where possible, but this isn't a situation where it makes economic or environmental sense.
- _8j50 3y agoBut consumer cpus use less power and having a lot of them means you can be granular with power usage and use a lot less power. I would also challenge that using more power is not a problem if your energy sourcre is nuclear or renewable.
- duskwuff 3y ago> But consumer cpus use less power and having a lot of them means you can be granular with power usage and use a lot less power. Unfortunately, this simply isn't true. There's quite a bit of "fixed" power consumption that doesn't scale with usage -- DRAM controllers, PCIe, Ethernet PHYs, etc. Not only does that power consumption not go away when a machine isn't being used, but it's all also incurred per machine that's running, so a network of many small computers will also use a lot more power on these constant loads. > I would also challenge that using more power is not a problem if your energy sourcre is nuclear or renewable. I would love to live in a world where that were the case. Sadly, it is not. Renewable does not mean free.