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My Mac mini (M1) sips ~6W idle and is completely inaudible. It acts as a desktop whenever I need it to, and as a server 24/7. I only power up my NAS (WoL) for d
by rollcat 2y ago
My Mac mini (M1) sips ~6W idle and is completely inaudible. It acts as a desktop whenever I need it to, and as a server 24/7. I only power up my NAS (WoL) for daily backups. The rest of the homelab is for fun and experiments, but mostly gone.
"Idle" x86-64 SOHO servers still eat ~30W with carefully selected parts and when correctly tuned, >60W if you just put together random junk. "Cloud" works because of economies of scale. If there's a future where people own their stuff, minimising power draw is a key step.
- PhilipRoman 2y agoThe low power draw is definitely not exclusive to Macs, a similar x86 mini PC with Linux will also draw around 5W idle.
- rollcat 2y agoDoes the mini PC go from zero to eleven though? Can I play BG3, Factorio, or Minecraft on the same hardware? Can I saturate a TB3 port? Transcode video? Run an LLM or text2img? Any of that while remaining responsive, having a video call? If I already need a powerful machine for a desktop, why would I need a second one just so it can stay up 24/7 to run Miniflux or Syncthing? Less is more.
- hedora 2y agoYes; for about $1000. Eg: https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-ser9-ai-9-hx-370 https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-ser9-ai-9-hx-370 I have the ser-8 model, and can confirm everything works under Linux. This one has an 80 TOPS AI thing, since you asked about llms.
- rollcat 2y agoHuh, pretty cool. Would you mind submitting your scores to Geekbench? Can you also test idle power? Genuinely interested.