Comment by eadmund
2 days ago
> I'd assume that a modern CPU would do the same amount of work with a fraction of energy so that it does not even make economical sense to run such outdated hardware.
There are 8,760 hours in a non-leap year. Electricity in the U.S. averages 12.53 cents per kilowatt hour[1]. A really power-hungry CPU running full-bore at 500 W for a year would thus use about $550 of electricity. Even if power consumption dropped by half, that’s only about 10% of the cost of a new computer, so the payoff date of an upgrade is ten years in the future (ignoring the cost of performing the upgrade, which is non-negligible — as is the risk).
And of course buying a new computer is a capital expense, while paying for electricity is an operating expense.
1: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
You can buy a mini pc for less than $550. For $200 on Amazon you can get an N97 based box with 12 GB RAM and 4 cores running at 3 GHz and a 500 GB SATA SSD. That’s got to be as fast as their current build systems and supports the required instructions.
Those single memory channel shitboxes aren't even fast enough to be usable during big windows updates let alone used in production.
not to even mention the "cooling" solutions they have
One channel of DDR5-4800 actually competes pretty well against four channels of DDR3-1333 spread across two chiplets, which was the best Opteron configuration old enough to not have SSE4.1.
if you don't understand bandwidths and how long componenets can run at the 80pctile before failure, you're out of your element in this discussion.