I appreciate that this is a volunteer project, but my back of the hand math suggests that if they upgraded to a $300 laptop using a 10nm intel chip, it would pay for itself in power usage within a few years. Actually, probably less, considering an i3-N305 has more cores and substantially faster single thread.
Yes, a used laptop would be an upgrade from server hardware of that vintage, in performance and probably in reliability. If they're really using hardware that old, that is itself a big red flag that F-Droid's infrastructure is fragile and unmaintained.
(A server that old might not have any SSDs, which would be insane for a software build server unless it was doing everything in RAM.)
I work in the refurb division of an ewaste recycling company[0]. $300 will get you a very nice used Thinkpad or Dell Latitude. They might even get by with some ~$50 mini desktops.
The build servers appear to be AMD Opteron G3s, which only support part of SSE4 (SSE4a). Full SSE4 support didn't land until Bulldozer (late 2011).
I appreciate that this is a volunteer project, but my back of the hand math suggests that if they upgraded to a $300 laptop using a 10nm intel chip, it would pay for itself in power usage within a few years. Actually, probably less, considering an i3-N305 has more cores and substantially faster single thread.
And yes, you could get that cost down easily.
Yes, a used laptop would be an upgrade from server hardware of that vintage, in performance and probably in reliability. If they're really using hardware that old, that is itself a big red flag that F-Droid's infrastructure is fragile and unmaintained.
(A server that old might not have any SSDs, which would be insane for a software build server unless it was doing everything in RAM.)
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I work in the refurb division of an ewaste recycling company[0]. $300 will get you a very nice used Thinkpad or Dell Latitude. They might even get by with some ~$50 mini desktops.
[0] https://www.ebay.com/str/evolutionecycling
It will have Intel ME which makes the whole open-source ideology... compromised?
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Someone send these people a Slimbook.
it's insane, i would give them my old xeon haswell machine for free, but the shipping cost is likely more than the cost of the machine itself.
Yes, SSE4.1 and SSSE3 have been introduced in ~2006. The F-Droid build server still uses that to build modern and some of the most popular FOSS apps.