On Sonntag, 9. Oktober 2022 10:39:20 CEST Stefan Seyfried wrote:
On 09.10.22 08:32, Neal Gompa wrote:
If we're going to bring up the environment, the computers made more than ten years ago are vastly more energy inefficient and pull more energy than most computers you can buy in the last five years.
I'd question that, at least with the given timeframes.
My (not hypothetical) "server" machine at home, running 24/7 is a Fujitsu Siemens Esprimo E730 machine. Small form factor professional desktop machine. Intel Core2 Duo E8500. 8GB RAM. 2 disks with rotating rust, 2TB and 4TB, spun down approx 95% of the time. 2 SSDs, 512GB and 2TB. On-board gigabit ethernet, pcie gigabit ethernet card, pci DVB-S2 card.
Running vdr, openvpn, ssh, owncloud, some KVM vm occationally, NFS server, dhcp+dns+tftp server (dnsmasq).
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. 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, and after 3 years you reach break even.
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.
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. Current generation dedicated GPUs need 5W idle while driving a 4K display, a few years ago 15-20W were normal. 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). Yes, hardly any improvements the last few years.
It is a different issue if the CPU is actually doing stuff and running at full speed with all cores loaded fully, but this is in my experience a rather rare event (and on machines that are expected to run 100% CPU all the time usually even the basic power saving settings are disabled for alleged performance reasons).
Raising the baseline to x86_64-v2 also has the effect of raising the generational baseline to something that is generally useful for contemporary Linux system software.
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. Most Core2Duos will not have an SSD, nor 8 GByte or even 4 GByte of memory. Notable exception, but far from typical.
"Linux system software" (which, in my book, is kernel, system services, most simple server daemons) runs perfectly well on such a system.
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. Regards, Stefan