5 ms·

At some point, the efficiency of new hardware completely outweighs the benefits of keeping old hardware running. Obviously there's a valid need to preserve hard

At some point, the efficiency of new hardware completely outweighs the benefits of keeping old hardware running. Obviously there's a valid need to preserve hardware for historical purposes, but for any other reason I think it's a false economy. The CPU on a Raspberry Pi 4 is nearly three times faster than a 3.2GHz Pentium 4. A Raspberry Pi draws no more than 10W (excluding USB devices), but the Pentium 4 has a TDP of 100W. We could draw a parallel with incandescent vs LED lightbulbs, but I think that would be too kind to the old computer - an old motherboard and a discrete GPU will add substantially to the idle power consumption.

hakfoo 3y ago
The problem is that, while the RasPi may be 3x as fast, it doesn't necessarily have the software ecosystem you want. If all you have is a closed-source Win32 program that barely runs on XP, at best, you can emulate the P4, thus likely eating up much if not all the RasPi's performance increase, and diving deep into the realms of undocumented behaviour and incompatibilities. I'm surprised we don't see more moonshot efforts into improving decompilation/reverse-engineering toolkits. There's a huge and obvious need for "I have this software, the developer's dead/bankrupt/disinterested, can you get me something close enough to human-readable C that I could compile it against winelib and get it running on a more modern machine?"
prmoustache 3y ago
OTOH you can get a complete computer with a pentium 4 or core 2 duo / athlon64 complete with keyboard, mouse and sometimes even screen for free or pennies because people want to offload that big tower and a 19" screen they don't use anymore while a 80€ Raspberry Pi 4 doesn't get you anywhere. Discounting storage[1], you'd have to buy a keyboard, mouse, screen and usb power supply and possibly a case to have a comparable raspberry PI 4[2]. I see PI 400 being sold at 130€ with a mouse these days. [1] because you would also want to upgrade said vintage computer with an SSD anyway [2] and in the second hand market raspberry pi 4 aren't going much cheaper, you just usually get an additionnal case and/or sdcard for the price of a single new board.
dijit 3y ago
yet at some point we tend to throw efficiency at the wall for raw compute. it was exceedingly uncommon for PC's in the Pentium 4 era to ship with anything higher than a 200W PSU. Yet today it is not uncommon to hear of 850W PSU's. Of course such PSU's are undoubtedly more efficient at doing the conversion. What I mean is that the argument of (power) efficiency doesn't hold when we actually end up using significant more power anyway. Also, to play devils advocate a bit, that's a 20yo PC: how many times would you have upgraded in 20 years- and what is the carbon cost of all of those upgrades? Some PC manufacturing is pretty bad for the environment. I'd guess once every 3-5 years? According to "8 Billion Trees": > the Carbon Footprint of a Computer? A desktop computer emits 778 kgs of CO2e annually. Of this, 85% results from emissions during manufacture and shipping, and 15% results from electricity consumption when in use. https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/carbon-footprint-of-a-laptop/#:~:text=What%20Is%20the%20Carbon%20Footprint%20of%20a%20Computer%3F,electricity%20consumption%20when%20in%20use https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/carbon-foot.... So you have to really ask yourself: when is that upfront cost paid for by the inefficiency of energy use (which can be sourced sustainably unlike many parts of PC manufacture)? 20 years? Sure, but it's still very questionable at 10 years. If only we didn't force people to upgrade their computers by making more and more features non-optional and slowing down the computing experience for the sake of producing features easier for developers. --- EDIT: I can't stop thinking abut this; I think I've been nerd sniped: I can't find good data on this though, it seems like a new laptop costs the planet 422.5kgs of CO2e on average. The actual running cost of the Pentium 4 (mobo, ram, etc) itself is somewhere around 40w for this generation (not including peripherals, discrete GPU or screen) - it does not have speedstep so can't power down. a high end dGPU from the era runs about the the same as the entire PC. so let's double that 40w. -- we ignore peripherals and screens as those could be the same for both new and old PC's. 80w used roughly for 8hrs per day? That comes to about 292kW a year roughly. In the US energy generation costs 0.3712kgs CO2e per kWh; so something like 109kgs of CO2e for running this PC for a year. Meaning even if your energy efficiency of a new PC doubled (using 40w instead of 80w) it would take nearly 5 years to offset the carbon cost of a new PC. Not discounting that energy production can be carbon neutral. That said, currently: The most efficient x86 computer will consume 10W to 25W at idle.
- hakfoo 3y ago
vkaku 3y ago
I think that new software bloat far outweighs the benefits brought in by new hardware as well. You would also need to ask how many people here actually use Raspberry Pis as their daily driver to claim the power benefits that they should be realizing today. I think that viewing this as a pure power consumption exercise is very reductive at best. Then, in that spirit, you should also be going behind the people running the H100s today and asking why they aren't running their model training on a RPi 4 yet.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  > there is a lot of old software that is still updated and not bloated. The only things that really need more resources are video capabilities and web technos. For example there are window managers that were considered bloat 20-25y ago and that are considered lightweight. Icewm takes something like 16MB on a 64bit distro nowadays. It would have been considered bloat back in the days but is very far than what you are using with a default kde plasma or gnome desktop running idle without apps. There are still cli or gui lightweight music players, image viewers, word processors, spreadsheets tools, file managers, etc. Until you start a web browser and as long as you are using a lightweight DE you can run many modern linux distros with only 256MB of ram.
- myk9001 3y ago
  > I think that new software bloat far outweighs the benefits brought in by new hardware as well. While software bloat is undeniably a problem, in my experience it's not that clear-cut. E.g., a messanger app built on Elector is a pure bloat. At least, from technical perspective -- maybe Electron brings in business value that outweighs the technical downsides. But an IDE from around 2005 is nothing more than a dumb notepad in comparison to a modern JetBrains IDE. Even though I often find their IDEs extremely frustrating in terms of consumed computational resources, I'd rather upgrade my hardware than go back to something less "smart". After all, hardware is just a means to an end of solving whatever task at hand.
  - vkaku 3y ago
    An IDE from even 2001 isn't as dumb as you would think at all. In fact, I was one of those early adopters of Websphere Application Studio (Eclipse) and I thought it was bloated. 20 years later, it's the same argument, same stack (Java). Cut to 20 years from now, you may remember JetBrains as the best thing you had worked on - and that some other JavaScript IDE in 2043, which requires a bare minimum 128GB of RAM to run - will be the means to that end for those developers. See you in 20 years. :-)
swagempire 3y ago
That's a specific choice you make -- let's be clear about that. Your measurement of value is hardware efficiency, which is valid. But I may have a favourite laptop that's just the right size with the perfect keyboard, or a gaming rig setup that's awesome for CS. Ultimately what hardware we choose to keep in service is a personal choice.
shrubble 3y ago
The Pentium from 2004 doesn't have a binary blob OS that can't be disabled running on it, that has full unrestricted access to the hardware. The Pi does, unless the Pi4 changed something...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
forgotmypw17 3y ago
For many people in the world, possibly the majority, whatever old hardware they happen to have, that is what they have, and there is no replacing it. There is also something to be said for treating any functioning hardware as worth preserving, just because it already exists, just like a human's life is worth preserving, just because they're already alive. Also, for environmental reasons, because the environmental impact of manufacturing an entire new computer from scratch is much higher than the power saved by running a more efficient one. Finally, of course, there is simply personal preference, whether due to unique features (as mentioned in a sibling comment), lack of features you do not want, and sentimental value.
mrweasel 3y ago
> The CPU on a Raspberry Pi 4 is nearly three times faster than a 3.2GHz Pentium 4. It sure doesn't feel like it. It was never questioned if a Pentium 4 would make an OK desktop, of course it did. The Raspberry Pi 4,... It feels like it should be completely fine for email, Internet browsing, word processing and pretty much any office work, but it's just to slow. People are even maxing out a Raspberry Pi 3 (or 4) running home assistant... Yet an old DOS machine can run an entire factory production line (or multiple). We really need to do much better on software.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  Isn't most of this is because people are running their OS from an SDcard, with a heavyish desktop environment? Are people using libreoffice Writer or abiword for word processing? libreoffice Calc or gnumeric for a spreadsheet? Thunderbird or claws-mail for email? What about the DE they are using? Have you tried running home assistant from an old Pentium 4?
- bayindirh 3y ago
  The problem is that we don't optimize the software (most desktop apps), or don't understand the processing power required to complete a task (i.e. home assistant). I have successfully ran DNSMasq, WebFS, qBittorrent, VSFTPD and Syncthing at the same time on a OrangePi Zero with 4 cores and 512MB of RAM. That thing is barely bigger than a postage stamp. I'll switch to a much more powerful device, because I need more hardware acceleration for video encoding and such, but other than that, the same Pi Zero can still handle the tasks needed.
  - mrweasel 3y ago
    Back in 1999, me and two roommates ran ipchains, Samba and an FTP server on an old PC, it had a 120MHz Pentium and 32MB of RAM. The only reason it didn't run more service was: What services would that even be? Took up a lot more space than a stamp though.
    - bayindirh 3y ago
TMWNN 3y ago
>At some point, the efficiency of new hardware completely outweighs the benefits of keeping old hardware running. Agreed. That's why the best solution is to run old software on new hardware. Vernor Vinge figured this out 25 years ago. A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human society thousands of years in the future, in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. <https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/ https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/> (This week I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It has been a VM for 15 years, and began as a physical machine more than two decades ago.)
eisa01 3y ago
Has recycling progressed far enough that these old computers are a "gold mine" and should be repurposed for that reason alone? Or is it still "just" a energy efficiency aspect?
RecycledEle 3y ago
The cost of a Pentium III and the electricity to run it might be much, much less that the cost of labor to move one application over to a Raspberry Pi. Then the cost of debugging the application on a Pi 4 might be more than the value of the company trying to run it.
- johnklos 3y ago
  You were sold a silly idea: that the reason software isn't portable has to do with work and resources. That's simply not true in a vast majority of instances. Companies intentionally lock software to certain platforms for sales reasons much, much more often than for technical reasons. OTOH, Windows isn't portable, so if you want to run old Windows software, you don't move it - you emulate it.
sbrorson 3y ago
That's not how the real world works. A lot of manufacturing equipment and test stands were developed using LabView and used NI cards to control equipment and take data. The people who developed all that stuff are long gone and the new people neither understand the old stuff nor do they have time to spend many months spelunking into the guts of the old software to maintain it. Their managers are also very reluctant to change anything since it means very expensive downtime for an entire assembly line. Downtime can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. Everybody wants to keep the old stuff running as long as possible -- generally several decades. I have no experience in the banking industry but I do hear the same considerations I see in manufacturing exist in banking software. Any change is fraught with major risk (millions of dollars in loss) so change is avoided as much as possible. I see lots of people on HN talk about how change and churn is avoided in banking software ... the same applies to manufacturing. The Rasberry Pi comment is laughable. I'm not talking about toys for hobbyists. I'm talking about computers running software controlling cards costing tens of thousands of dollars running physical equipment of equal or greater expense. Nobody will hire a hobby hacker to light a few LEDs with a Pi when doing factory automation.
- userbinator 3y ago
  Also, it's laughable to talk about power consumption when the PC is controlling an industrial system that's using many kW or even MW of power. At that level, 10W vs 100W is noise.

hakfoo 3y ago

The problem is that, while the RasPi may be 3x as fast, it doesn't necessarily have the software ecosystem you want. If all you have is a closed-source Win32 program that barely runs on XP, at best, you can emulate the P4, thus likely eating up much if not all the RasPi's performance increase, and diving deep into the realms of undocumented behaviour and incompatibilities. I'm surprised we don't see more moonshot efforts into improving decompilation/reverse-engineering toolkits. There's a huge and obvious need for "I have this software, the developer's dead/bankrupt/disinterested, can you get me something close enough to human-readable C that I could compile it against winelib and get it running on a more modern machine?"

prmoustache 3y ago

OTOH you can get a complete computer with a pentium 4 or core 2 duo / athlon64 complete with keyboard, mouse and sometimes even screen for free or pennies because people want to offload that big tower and a 19" screen they don't use anymore while a 80€ Raspberry Pi 4 doesn't get you anywhere. Discounting storage[1], you'd have to buy a keyboard, mouse, screen and usb power supply and possibly a case to have a comparable raspberry PI 4[2]. I see PI 400 being sold at 130€ with a mouse these days. [1] because you would also want to upgrade said vintage computer with an SSD anyway [2] and in the second hand market raspberry pi 4 aren't going much cheaper, you just usually get an additionnal case and/or sdcard for the price of a single new board.

dijit 3y ago

yet at some point we tend to throw efficiency at the wall for raw compute. it was exceedingly uncommon for PC's in the Pentium 4 era to ship with anything higher than a 200W PSU. Yet today it is not uncommon to hear of 850W PSU's. Of course such PSU's are undoubtedly more efficient at doing the conversion. What I mean is that the argument of (power) efficiency doesn't hold when we actually end up using significant more power anyway. Also, to play devils advocate a bit, that's a 20yo PC: how many times would you have upgraded in 20 years- and what is the carbon cost of all of those upgrades? Some PC manufacturing is pretty bad for the environment. I'd guess once every 3-5 years? According to "8 Billion Trees": > the Carbon Footprint of a Computer? A desktop computer emits 778 kgs of CO2e annually. Of this, 85% results from emissions during manufacture and shipping, and 15% results from electricity consumption when in use. https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/carbon-footprint-of-a-laptop/#:~:text=What%20Is%20the%20Carbon%20Footprint%20of%20a%20Computer%3F,electricity%20consumption%20when%20in%20use https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/carbon-foot.... So you have to really ask yourself: when is that upfront cost paid for by the inefficiency of energy use (which can be sourced sustainably unlike many parts of PC manufacture)? 20 years? Sure, but it's still very questionable at 10 years. If only we didn't force people to upgrade their computers by making more and more features non-optional and slowing down the computing experience for the sake of producing features easier for developers. --- EDIT: I can't stop thinking abut this; I think I've been nerd sniped: I can't find good data on this though, it seems like a new laptop costs the planet 422.5kgs of CO2e on average. The actual running cost of the Pentium 4 (mobo, ram, etc) itself is somewhere around 40w for this generation (not including peripherals, discrete GPU or screen) - it does not have speedstep so can't power down. a high end dGPU from the era runs about the the same as the entire PC. so let's double that 40w. -- we ignore peripherals and screens as those could be the same for both new and old PC's. 80w used roughly for 8hrs per day? That comes to about 292kW a year roughly. In the US energy generation costs 0.3712kgs CO2e per kWh; so something like 109kgs of CO2e for running this PC for a year. Meaning even if your energy efficiency of a new PC doubled (using 40w instead of 80w) it would take nearly 5 years to offset the carbon cost of a new PC. Not discounting that energy production can be carbon neutral. That said, currently: The most efficient x86 computer will consume 10W to 25W at idle.

hakfoo 3y ago

vkaku 3y ago

I think that new software bloat far outweighs the benefits brought in by new hardware as well. You would also need to ask how many people here actually use Raspberry Pis as their daily driver to claim the power benefits that they should be realizing today. I think that viewing this as a pure power consumption exercise is very reductive at best. Then, in that spirit, you should also be going behind the people running the H100s today and asking why they aren't running their model training on a RPi 4 yet.

prmoustache 3y ago
> there is a lot of old software that is still updated and not bloated. The only things that really need more resources are video capabilities and web technos. For example there are window managers that were considered bloat 20-25y ago and that are considered lightweight. Icewm takes something like 16MB on a 64bit distro nowadays. It would have been considered bloat back in the days but is very far than what you are using with a default kde plasma or gnome desktop running idle without apps. There are still cli or gui lightweight music players, image viewers, word processors, spreadsheets tools, file managers, etc. Until you start a web browser and as long as you are using a lightweight DE you can run many modern linux distros with only 256MB of ram.
myk9001 3y ago
> I think that new software bloat far outweighs the benefits brought in by new hardware as well. While software bloat is undeniably a problem, in my experience it's not that clear-cut. E.g., a messanger app built on Elector is a pure bloat. At least, from technical perspective -- maybe Electron brings in business value that outweighs the technical downsides. But an IDE from around 2005 is nothing more than a dumb notepad in comparison to a modern JetBrains IDE. Even though I often find their IDEs extremely frustrating in terms of consumed computational resources, I'd rather upgrade my hardware than go back to something less "smart". After all, hardware is just a means to an end of solving whatever task at hand.
- vkaku 3y ago
  An IDE from even 2001 isn't as dumb as you would think at all. In fact, I was one of those early adopters of Websphere Application Studio (Eclipse) and I thought it was bloated. 20 years later, it's the same argument, same stack (Java). Cut to 20 years from now, you may remember JetBrains as the best thing you had worked on - and that some other JavaScript IDE in 2043, which requires a bare minimum 128GB of RAM to run - will be the means to that end for those developers. See you in 20 years. :-)

swagempire 3y ago

That's a specific choice you make -- let's be clear about that. Your measurement of value is hardware efficiency, which is valid. But I may have a favourite laptop that's just the right size with the perfect keyboard, or a gaming rig setup that's awesome for CS. Ultimately what hardware we choose to keep in service is a personal choice.

shrubble 3y ago

The Pentium from 2004 doesn't have a binary blob OS that can't be disabled running on it, that has full unrestricted access to the hardware. The Pi does, unless the Pi4 changed something...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

forgotmypw17 3y ago

For many people in the world, possibly the majority, whatever old hardware they happen to have, that is what they have, and there is no replacing it. There is also something to be said for treating any functioning hardware as worth preserving, just because it already exists, just like a human's life is worth preserving, just because they're already alive. Also, for environmental reasons, because the environmental impact of manufacturing an entire new computer from scratch is much higher than the power saved by running a more efficient one. Finally, of course, there is simply personal preference, whether due to unique features (as mentioned in a sibling comment), lack of features you do not want, and sentimental value.

mrweasel 3y ago

> The CPU on a Raspberry Pi 4 is nearly three times faster than a 3.2GHz Pentium 4. It sure doesn't feel like it. It was never questioned if a Pentium 4 would make an OK desktop, of course it did. The Raspberry Pi 4,... It feels like it should be completely fine for email, Internet browsing, word processing and pretty much any office work, but it's just to slow. People are even maxing out a Raspberry Pi 3 (or 4) running home assistant... Yet an old DOS machine can run an entire factory production line (or multiple). We really need to do much better on software.

prmoustache 3y ago
Isn't most of this is because people are running their OS from an SDcard, with a heavyish desktop environment? Are people using libreoffice Writer or abiword for word processing? libreoffice Calc or gnumeric for a spreadsheet? Thunderbird or claws-mail for email? What about the DE they are using? Have you tried running home assistant from an old Pentium 4?
bayindirh 3y ago
The problem is that we don't optimize the software (most desktop apps), or don't understand the processing power required to complete a task (i.e. home assistant). I have successfully ran DNSMasq, WebFS, qBittorrent, VSFTPD and Syncthing at the same time on a OrangePi Zero with 4 cores and 512MB of RAM. That thing is barely bigger than a postage stamp. I'll switch to a much more powerful device, because I need more hardware acceleration for video encoding and such, but other than that, the same Pi Zero can still handle the tasks needed.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  Back in 1999, me and two roommates ran ipchains, Samba and an FTP server on an old PC, it had a 120MHz Pentium and 32MB of RAM. The only reason it didn't run more service was: What services would that even be? Took up a lot more space than a stamp though.
  - bayindirh 3y ago

TMWNN 3y ago

>At some point, the efficiency of new hardware completely outweighs the benefits of keeping old hardware running. Agreed. That's why the best solution is to run old software on new hardware. Vernor Vinge figured this out 25 years ago. A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human society thousands of years in the future, in which pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. <https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/ https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/> (This week I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It has been a VM for 15 years, and began as a physical machine more than two decades ago.)

eisa01 3y ago

Has recycling progressed far enough that these old computers are a "gold mine" and should be repurposed for that reason alone? Or is it still "just" a energy efficiency aspect?

RecycledEle 3y ago

The cost of a Pentium III and the electricity to run it might be much, much less that the cost of labor to move one application over to a Raspberry Pi. Then the cost of debugging the application on a Pi 4 might be more than the value of the company trying to run it.

johnklos 3y ago
You were sold a silly idea: that the reason software isn't portable has to do with work and resources. That's simply not true in a vast majority of instances. Companies intentionally lock software to certain platforms for sales reasons much, much more often than for technical reasons. OTOH, Windows isn't portable, so if you want to run old Windows software, you don't move it - you emulate it.

sbrorson 3y ago

That's not how the real world works. A lot of manufacturing equipment and test stands were developed using LabView and used NI cards to control equipment and take data. The people who developed all that stuff are long gone and the new people neither understand the old stuff nor do they have time to spend many months spelunking into the guts of the old software to maintain it. Their managers are also very reluctant to change anything since it means very expensive downtime for an entire assembly line. Downtime can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. Everybody wants to keep the old stuff running as long as possible -- generally several decades. I have no experience in the banking industry but I do hear the same considerations I see in manufacturing exist in banking software. Any change is fraught with major risk (millions of dollars in loss) so change is avoided as much as possible. I see lots of people on HN talk about how change and churn is avoided in banking software ... the same applies to manufacturing. The Rasberry Pi comment is laughable. I'm not talking about toys for hobbyists. I'm talking about computers running software controlling cards costing tens of thousands of dollars running physical equipment of equal or greater expense. Nobody will hire a hobby hacker to light a few LEDs with a Pi when doing factory automation.

userbinator 3y ago
Also, it's laughable to talk about power consumption when the PC is controlling an industrial system that's using many kW or even MW of power. At that level, 10W vs 100W is noise.