On Sat, 22 Jul 2017 at 22:06:30 -0700
Rick Moen <rick@???> 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