Comment by starkparker
2 days ago
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).
2 days ago
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.)
How is it that if hardware is old, that means it's unmaintained, or that if it's old, it can't have SSDs? Neither of those things are typically inferred from age.
I still maintain old servers, and even my Amiga server has an SSD.
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There are some more possible virtues except of performance and probably-reliability.
I have computers from the early 2000s that now have SSDs in them. You can get cheap adapters to use SATA and CompactFlash storage on old machines.
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?
If they're relying on binaries from Google, then it's already compromised.
there are a handful of vendors that will sell you an intel chip with the me disabled, as well as arm vendors that ship boards without an me-equivalent at all
the point of my post still stands
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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.