On 09.10.22 20:14, Stefan Brüns wrote:
On Sonntag, 9. Oktober 2022 10:39:20 CEST Stefan Seyfried wrote:
When idling (which is is probably about 90% of the time), it draws about 30-35 Watts. Given the hardware in there (2x GBit ethernet, DVB-S2 card), there is not a huge part of the energy consumption that can be accounted to CPU / chipset.
When I measured my Haswell E3-1245 workstation some years ago, it measured at about 15W in idle. This is with a Supermicro workstation board (2x GBit, several PCIe + PCI) and at that time included 2x spinning rust, a SSD and a Soundblaster Audigy 2 (PCI). So probably about 15-20W to be saved.
OK, i did not really revisit this the last years. 15W total with 2 disks (usually 2 to 5W each, unless spun down, 2x gigabit links (1W each) and even more peripherals is really a nice number. I'm going to get an Esprimo P710 Core i3 3220 (AFAICT the last model year that still contains a PCI bus for my DVB-S2 card ;-) and do some measurements at that one. Should be of about the same age and perform similarly well (power consumption wise).
c't had a test of refurbished office PCs in issue 18/2022, 6th or 8th generation Intel i5, idle power between 8.3W and 11.9W, 111€-329€. The DVB-S2 PCI card can be replaced with a USB stick or PCIe card,
No it can't. The USB boxes are *all* crap and usually randomly fail to respond after a few weeks of uptime (I have quite a selection of these resting in some buckets...) The PCIe cards are either just usb chips with an PCIe usb controller (the cheap ones), or there are only externally maintained drivers (of questionable quality) available. Due to the current dire situation with upstream kernel DVB driver maintenance, anything not already in tree for quite some time will most likely not get into it because the current maintainer is apparently a bit "complicated". So it will be a 3rd gen i3 for now. I'll check the idle power consumption and then decide if there is significantly more that can be saved by dropping the DVB-S2 card any maybe replacing it with another network SAT>IP tuner (if I can still find one on ebay).
The improvements with energy consumptions in the last 10 years have mostly been in the areas of "connected standby" (windows only AFAIK), faster suspend and resume etc, which all is a non-issue here.
There have been improvements throughout the bench. For desktop PCs, one of the most important improvements have been power supplies and efficiency under low load.
OK, I was mostly looking at Laptop machines. I'll now check a (slightly ;) newer desktop
I have been involved with handling of and caring/developing for notebook computers running linux for 20 years now, and the great improvements to battery life have been the intel Centrino Platform (pentium M, the return to the old P3 architecture) and then again the intel core/core2 platforms (where, AFAICT also the "we switch peripherals into low power modes" stuff started to be actually of benefit), but the last 10 years have mostly improved the battery technology and not really reduced power usage in a significant way.
20 years ago, systems had 512 MByte of RAM, Core2Duos typically 2 or sometimes 4 GByte. Now typical systems have 8 or 16 GByte of significantly faster RAM, and idle power nevertheless went down slightly. Energy ratings of batteries stayed the same (40-70Wh), only energy density went up.
Many efficiency improvement were set off by larger (high res) screens, larger memory, higher peak performance.
That's possible. It's just that 10 year old Laptop machines are, with very small investments (ssd, memory) able to run current software totally fine for many applications. And even the battery life of a 12 year old X200s (which got a new battery a few years ago, of course) is still very usable (3+ hours, I have not run down that battery for quite some time so I don't know the exact time. Battery life of that core2 duo ultra-low-voltage machine is "orders of magnitude" better than my Toughbook CF51, 1.6GHz Banias machine which, with a new battery, can reach 2+ hours if I'm careful).
Current generation dedicated GPUs need 5W idle while driving a 4K display, a few years ago 15-20W were normal.
No idea, the last dedicated GPU I used was the ATI graphics in an hp nc6000 notebook almost 15 years ago (and when I, just for fun, tried to install tumbleweed on that machine a year ago I found out that this driver is really no longer working, even though it is still included, while the intel driver for the Toughbook's i815 graphics still chugs along nicely ;)
A NUC with a Celeron N5105 needs 3W in idle, 30W max and has a higher performance than the "highend" Phenom II X6 mentioned elsewhere (53W idle).
aren't the NUCs basically "notebook systems without a display" (components wise)? But yes, that's impressive.
Yes, hardly any improvements the last few years.
It will be interesting to see the difference between the old Core2 duo machine (with all the non-essential hardware removed) and the new core i3 machine (before adding the additional disks and peripherals). I'll report back how much of a difference that makes. I'll let me suprise how much the bare metal consumes and how much my additional peripherals draw.
I would go with that argument if it was true. Running a linux XFCE desktop on the 8GB Thinkpad x200s (core-2 duo ultra low power 1,8GHz?) is getting a tad laggy, but it's mostly the tab-switching in the browsers or stuff like that which I'd actually guess is due to the graphics stuff, but it is well usable still.
So, "getting laggy". For a system, which likely has been upgraded as far as possible (more RAM, apparently SSD). With some effort and some compromises you were able to squeeze out a little bit of extra lifetime. And still supported with Leap 15.x.
And windows 10. The "getting laggy" is that I start to notice the screen redraw of the browser when switching tabs, so it is maybe taking 30+ms when I do not notice this on my newer T430 machine. So it's not 'oh, I have to wait for a second after switching tabs'. (That's more the experience on the Toughbook, but right now nobody is really arguing for no longer supporting that machine ;-) And yes, almost all my old machines (and of everyone who asks me for Hardware advice) have been upgraded wrt. memory and switched from rotating rust to SSD, because that's really the cheapest way to make an old computer perfectly usable again for very little money. A 10 year old machine with 4+GB RAM and an SSD is still perfectly usable for most people nowadays, and the necessary investment is usually less than 50€.
Most Core2Duos will not have an SSD, nor 8 GByte or even 4 GByte of memory. Notable exception, but far from typical.
Most core2duos that are still in use today will have an SSD and 4+GB of memory. At least that is my experience and the advice I give to everyone who asks me wrt. computer hardware. "Should I buy the new shiny laptop from Mediamarkt? It has 2TB storage!!!!" "no, let's add some memory and a ssd to your old machine and it will do better for a tenth of the price.
If we were to "remove support for hardware that prevents systems being useful", then we would remove support for rotating-rust-drives. Adding a SSD to an even more than 10 year old system makes it from "unbearably bad" to "neatly usable again" in no time with only a small investment. Even my trusty Toughbook CF-51 (intel centrino, Banias 1,6GHz, 2GB RAM) became usable again after adding an ide-to-m2 adapter and a m2.sata drive, and it has a REAL SERIAL PORT!!! ;-)
A RPi3 or RPi4 probably runs cirles around it (or many other AArch64 SBCs), and also come with a real serial port, even several.
Of course. But the toughbook has the added benefit of being tough. And the raspberry pi's serial ports just die (togehter with the rest of the CPU) if I connect them to the wrong pins of the Motorcycle ECU I'm trying to program with it. And there's no Display and battery to see what I'm doing. And it can't run the software needed. So the toughbook is the right tool for *that* job ;-) Even if it's old and slow. And it doesn't complain if it get's dropped from the seat, again. -- Stefan Seyfried "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Richard Feynman